EP 133: Transforming Education for HumanThriving & Global Sustainability | Zachary Stein

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Care about from a unique perspective. 100% ownership for each and every circumstance we face in life, day in and day out. Hi, welcome to the Radical Responsibility podcast. This is your host, Fleet Maul, and I'm really excited today to share a conversation I had with Zach Stein, an educational psychologist and philosopher who's really one of the most innovative thinkers in terms of where we need to go to completely rethink, re envision, reimagine and re engineer our education system. Really, you know, we really need to turn it inside out and upside down because there's so many things about it that aren't really setting people up for success in today's world and allowing so many people to fall through the cracks. Zach Stein is really a leading philosopher in the world of sense making. He's been on countless podcasts and forums and is really one of the most brilliant, innovative thinkers I've ever had the opportunity to interview. And he just has such incredibly, a deep understanding about the process of education. What is education really all about and what is its purpose? And how can we best serve each generation of young people coming into our life and into our society to really set them up for success and set ourselves up societally and globally for success by focusing education where it really needs to be within the. Within the context and a paradigm that's really appropriate to the times we're facing and probably would have been always appropriate, but you know, a really humanistic and empowering approach to education that would really be an example of glow call to really think globally, but act locally. And he's really talking about a decentralized educational system that engages all of us in educating the young people in our own communities. So give it a listen.

Zach Stein, welcome, Zach, it's great to be back. Great to see you again. I'm Fleet Mall, one of the summit hosts, and I'm really looking forward to our conversation today. Zach and I want to let our audience know a little bit about you before we get started.

Zach Stein is a philosopher of education working at the interface of psychology, metaphysics and politics. He has published two books, including Education in a Time Between Worlds. I love that title along with dozens of articles. This writing was done as he worked on co founding a nonprofit and think tank, as well as teaching graduate students at Harvard and consulting with technology startups. Zach is a longtime meditator, musician and caregiver, and which has shaped him more than any professional engagements. You can find out more about Zach's work@zachstein.org Zach lives up in Vermont, and I think you probably have a lot of that Vermontian quality of grit and also concern about being local as well as global. So maybe we'll touch on some of that today. And I believe you've also been involved in the conciliation project with Daniel Smachtenberger and others, looking at how to kind of reinvent our information ecology. Maybe we'll touch on that a bit today as well. Again, welcome. Really great to have you with us today.

That's wonderful to be back. Thank you for the intro. Yeah.

For those who get a chance to access last year's summit, the conversation that Ali Byner and Zach had was just really fascinating. I remember that so.

Well. Since you had that conversation with Ali for last year's summer, we've been through a lot, obviously been 13, 14 months of the lockdowns from the pandemic, tremendous amount of social upheaval in the US and much of the world around, the reckoning with race and racism and the problems with policing and the tragic killings that continue apace.

As well as the incredible divisive politics. The end, if you want to say, the death throes of the Trump administration.

But increasing political instability at home and around the world. And so sometimes I think we're going to have to somehow get outside of this to look back and see how incredibly daunting this last year or so has been. So I'm curious as to how it's been for you personally, for your family, for your community there in Vermont, or the people you engage with and, you know, things you maybe have learned. Some surprises. Just how's it been?

It's been intense, of course, for everyone. Yeah. I felt very fortunate to be in Vermont, frankly, to be in a rural area, to be able to get outside and easily take walks. So I've had a lot of sympathy and concern for the people who've had to undergo this in urban environments. And of course, that's most people. So I've been blessed with that. And.

Yeah, you mentioned the consilience project, and that's actually been the tone of the year for me because we were moving the project along. But when the pandemic hit, it became clear that these issues were actually extremely important. It seemed theoretical before, like civilizational collapse and the breakdown of things to take for granted and the escalation of information warfare, and all of these things seemed theoretical. And then it was happening. And so we kicked into high gear, basically. And you Know all the things you mentioned, environmental, public health, race relations, all of these things are mediated to us through the media. Now we have first person experience. We know someone or ourselves who've had Covid.

We have experienced police violence. So there's that sense of tangible lived experience. But the generalizations we have about what's actually taking place in the world, we construct with what is given to us through these media outlets. And so the Consilience project has been very concerned about the accelerating degradation of the fourth estate, which was intended when democracy was created, to balance the government, to create an independent civic.

Society, kind of like a public sphere that could actually check the powers of government and the economy through kind of giving voice to organizing the collective intelligence of the people, if you will. So you can see the law. And it's not news, as it were, that the news has been in decline. There's many stories about it, but it's gotten increasingly worse. And I think it's hard to put the finger on it, but it does seem to have something to do with the digital.

And it does have also something to do with the kind of perfecting of the art of communication science, which is now, it's a field that used to be called propaganda. And so there's something that's something that's happening I think a lot of people are aware of and it's related to the polarization issue in particular. So yeah, so I've been hanging on, I've been doing meta news analysis and writing theoretical pieces about the state of the ecological commons and thinking more specifically the theme of this conference about what does resiliency look like? How do you have a resilient educational commons or epistemic commons or information commons? How do we make those ideas that we need to understand ourselves in the world? How do we protect them and keep a space of communication that is free from coercion and strategic action to keep a space of real interest in reaching mutual understanding as opposed to just being strategic and trying to get you to do something. So that's what's been on my mind as I just hunker down in Vermont for the year.

So I'll leave it there.

Okay, well, yeah, and I think I look forward and our audience will look forward to hearing some of what you've learned in that process.

Process.

And we certainly want to explore what resilience looks like at the systemic level, whether it's our education system, our information ecology, various our public health system and so forth, and the relationship between sense making and resilience, which I think is very important to talk about. But perhaps first I'd be interested in your take on just resilience per se. You have a background as well as being an education philosopher. You're, you have a background in evolutionary psychology. So I'm wondering how you would define resilience even at the individual level and then perhaps as it's contextualized in relationship and community, culturally, even civilization. But maybe just starting with your understanding what resilience is.

Yeah, that's an excellent question. It's a foundational, almost philosophical question. And yeah, I studied developmental psychology, many fields of psychology. And the thing about even the concept of resilience, if you want to go to the philosophical kind of term analysis, it implies a wholeness, a prior wholeness which is being reassumed or remembered or.

Its integrity is being protected or something like that. So there's a, when I think about it, it's almost like the buoyancy of the organic, that the organic protects itself. The organic, when you heal, you like I cut myself the other day. I didn't do anything. I washed it and it healed itself.

Zach didn't make it do that. Nature made it do that.

If I drop my computer, it'll just break and it'll sit there for forever and will never fix itself.

And so it's important to see that the organic, and this is the. I'm a Piagetian, well, a neopiagetian and he was a biologist and an epistemologist, the great founder of kind of founder, so called, of developmental psychology. There were others of course involved and he was predicating the idea that the mind is like an organism, that the mind metabolizes its environment. And the mind is essentially like, you know, trying to maintain integrity in the face of adversity and trying to maintain its wholeness, particularly conceptual, self understanding and a few other things that are taking the organic metaphor up into the psychological.

Which is to say that the mind, which is to say, Zach, which is to say my personality needs certain things to be healthy and to not be out of integrity. And it needs certain things to heal and it can heal. So when I think of resilience, I think about that. I think about the integrity of the organic and the autopoetic and self healing nature of it. Yeah.

So is there wonder if we can think of.

Resiliency as kind of a latent capacity? You mentioned buoyancy. I like that term. Some people think of elasticity.

And, or whether there's kind of an impulse to homeostasis or, you know, sometimes we even Talk about the self organizing principles within chaos where there's some underlying matrix that at least in the organic world or the natural world that supports resilience.

Right? Yeah. It's negative entropy. Right. It's, it's the spontaneous self organ, self organizing directionality of the universe as we know it. If you want to get into the metaphysical like to Roy Beskar or the Ken Wilbers or the Deliar de Chardins or others, I mean there's even like the Stuart Kaufmans where you just see that.

We get something for nothing with the organic again, my finger heals itself. Now it needs nutrients and other things, but I can't make it do that and I can't take credit for doing that. So there's something very important about.

The.

Continuity and the capacity of nature for resilience and the absence of that in many man made things and man made systems that we built, fragile complicated systems. Whereas resilience systems tend to be complex and self regulating and again self recreating through autopoiesis and healing. So when you think about creating resilient systems, you have to think about how do you create complexity. We know how to create complicated things like computers and airplanes and other things or bureaucracies, but we don't know how to create complex things because you actually have to allow complex things to emerge.

Yeah.

So I'm wondering, I want to get to that level and I just want to plow the ground a little bit first before we get to even how we think of individual resilience. If we can think of it both as a state that we can learn to access in some way, or maybe there's a latent quality there, how do we bring that forward? Right. And now we're in a state of resilience, at least momentarily, as well as a trait. And a trait, maybe that's describing a latent capacity, but in a sense that it's that we can increase or it's trainable or it's a skill set or a set of skills that we can even at the individual level train up in to get a higher default trait, resilience. And, and then after we explore that, maybe we can start talking about that more at the collective and systemic level.

Yeah, that's very interesting. That's something I've thought about insofar as I dabbled in psychotherapeutic modalities. You think about how do you induce in someone a state of resiliency and then how do you inculcate over a longer term the acquired trait of just Being resilient. Sometimes I talk about in my psychological work these stations of the pre tragic tragic and post tragic.

The post tragic is actually intrinsically resilient. And everyone, not everyone, but many people have had the experience of being broken by a tragedy. Coming to the hospital, crying. And when the energy has passed through you sometimes and you're calm again, often you will reassume. You're almost a pure archetypal form of self. Like you'll feel like, whoa, clean. You'll look at the sky and there's an experience of the post tragic. So that can be a state of resiliency which the organism will spontaneously assume. But if you do, that happens enough, which is to say if you're forced to reassume through that resiliency enough, eventually you can become.

Kind of good at it, which is an absorb tragedy. And you can absorb it now. The trick here is that.

Sometimes.

You won't get it again. If you're not in the right state. It can make you tragedy can break you. So there's this question of resiliency always requires the contextual supports, both very concrete, like food and sleep and money and other things that people need to be able to hold what's coming at them. So that sense of.

Post traumatic growth, which is a. That's being studied, like much of that is about these little things, not sometimes in the environment that are just so essential to provide support. And then there are internal supports. And this is where meditative practice and religious tradition and other things which provide.

Not the concrete supports of the environment, God willing, those are there, but in the psyche. They provide for you a way to find again the archetypal form and specifically to find the meaning in it. That's one of the things you find in.

Post traumatic growth is actually that there's a deepening of the meaning of what happened.

And an opening of usually some form of spirituality essentially. So those I think are dimensions of resilience that are important. And I like that notion of it. It happens kind of spontaneously as a state where you just kind of rise to the occasion.

But then there's something in the environment and in self reflection and other things where it can become a skill that you actually are able to have. And then you become an extremely valuable member of your community. And that's important. We don't have traditions for passing that type of capacity on right now. And right now we're too many people being traumatized and not having the support and not being able to move into the post tragic resilient response. And that's one of the main things you see and.

Okay. Yeah, so yeah, it's a deep inquiry.

Yeah. And it's really important to recognize that it can go either way, can those experiences can be very debilitating and that can have something to do with the environment and the structures and the systems one is within. And I think we'll come back to that. But I like what you said about this idea of post tragic kind of experience that's almost like a state that someone's experiencing. And then, you know, I think in the integral work we talk about how, you know, how states can become.

Sort of internalized in the traits over time.

Right.

And through practice. And practice. Right. So. And you did connect that with post traumatic growth. And so kind of the science of resilience that different branches to it, but one part that really gave it a big leg up was the aversive child experiences studies, those longitudinal studies around Chilean. And what they saw was there a certain segment that experienced post traumatic growth that was almost where the idea of post traumatic growth was identified.

I think part of what we can explore is how do we create the systems that support that. However, today in the social sciences anyway, with the very strong influence of postmodernist philosophy and so forth, in the same way where they had this left, right argument between personal responsibility and collective responsibility, or personal responsibility and all the systemic causes and conditions and neither side wants to hear about the other because they think it's a slippery soap away from their position. Right. I've seen that there's a similar focus now in the academy on systemic resilience and not even wanting to talk about individual resilience because the fear that people point to, well, you see that outlier who's so resilient even in a terrible situation, why can't everybody do that or something? Or associating personal resilience with just grit, which I suppose maybe just genetic. Right. But kind of ignoring the fact that we can find exemplars of resilience who didn't just get there genetically, but actually have trained themselves up and maybe had the right supportive cause and condition. But then can we study those and understand how to generalize that education and start building that into our education system? So it's just we're kind of in a little stuck in that culture wars left, right place around this right now, I think so maybe we could begin to talk about.

If resilience is something that we can. Let's say maybe there's three levels of it. Perhaps there is some underlying state of resilience that exists organically and spiritually at the individual level and even at the collective level, so that we can learn to access that, bring that forward as a state. And then perhaps there are ways that we can train up to have a higher default level of resilience at the individual level. And then. So how would we then start to apply that to the collective and to systems if we really. Because in the current state of affairs, we've been optimizing complex systems for efficiency and profit, and thus they become very fragile, as we've seen with our current public health crisis and others. So how do we view systemic resilience in this way and build towards what we really need to deal with, what we're dealing with right now, much less survive or thrive? And what may come that may be even more challenging?

I mean, that's a great question. And I'll say, yeah, that I've seen that in the resiliency research. I've seen that people focusing on the individual traits that foster resilience, like grit, for example, and almost never talking about the environments. And then people focusing on that, that's very important. And of course, from an integral view, it's like, well, you're both right. Exactly. And so are those other couple views. And let's hold it all. And then you get into this deeper question of, okay, then how would you build institutions and communities in order to hit all of that? And in my book, it's funny, I end up saying, because I'm an educational philosopher. So people always came to me and they said, well, what school? What's the best school? What should I say? I ended up having to stop answering that question because you can't do school reform unless you do community reform. And you can't do community reform unless you do national reform. And it's even hard to do national reform unless you do planetary scale reform. So I ended up realizing that.

There'S a need to talk about what I call the 13 social miracles. And these are the conditions for the possibility of a education centric or human development centric civilization. And this is the ground truth answer to what you're asking, which is about how do we actually create the conditions that foster resiliency in human beings. Right now we have a society that is primarily treating human beings as extraction points.

For a 10 for data. Exactly. For attention, for labor, for commodity purchasing and things of that nature. And the goal of the civilization, it's a profit centric civilization, you mentioned it, which turns into efficiency centric civilization, which is not necessarily a learning civilization. Let alone one that's trying to foster the traits of the individuals and their communities that would allow us to respond to real complex challenges that require the total response of the population, which is what we're facing.

In the Social Miracles are some things that seemed radical when I wrote it. The book was published in 2019, but early in 2019.

I talked about the need for a global debt jubilee and more specifically a student loan debt jubilee. So that tied to something which I also recommend some kind of universal basic income, another thing. And then I go through 13 of these and they get increasingly, and I call them social miracles because they seem to be violating the laws of human nature. Because what they're doing is they're.

Flipping the script and saying actually no, it's our job to be more like a Good Samaritan and to give care without asking for something in return, as opposed to giving you something, always getting something. So the idea that one would for example, do a debt jubilee. So when I think about the resiliency of my generation and those beneath me through the kind of quarter life crisis which is now common, I think about the inability of people to weather that storm due to financial strain as a result of being forced go into student debt. To even have a place in society that you have to purchase basically equivalent of a house of education which is anywhere between 40 to 200,000 or more dollars in order to get the basic education which is provided in other countries as a part of being a citizen. And then also to get the basic education you need to even enter the economy in a productive way. So it becomes.

A necessary thing in order to foster resiliency of that entire generation. Otherwise they are going to be completely unable to pull out of that cycle of traumatization and re traumatization around finances and around.

What Maslow would call pathologies of self actualization, which is to say the thwarted self self actualization, which is the reason they went to college. So that's an example of where broad social policies are actually necessary. Now that's going to take time, but as we've seen, time is accelerating politically and historically. So it wouldn't surprise me to see sweeping debt forgiveness even on a global scale, given the nature of the financial crisis, which isn't being talked about as much as it should, that the pandemic created in terms of the relations between the global north and the global South. And then similarly, we've already been getting a basic income as part of the response of the governments across the world to the pandemic. It's easy to see that continuing especially job automation increases. I think we need to think at that level of planetary scope policy in order to even think at community level about what's possible. Because mostly when I speak to community leaders, educators, people trying to start schools, the surrounding infrastructures, financial, bureaucratic, legal.

Really make it difficult and are extremely predatory upon innovative, potentially resilient local initiatives. And so I'm constantly seeing that ceiling placed by the non local on what's possible at the level of local local. And the ceiling some kind of. It's like it's law basically it's a law and then some group that claims legitimate use to force and violence in relation to the law. So what we used to call a state which is now something more complex and tied up in corporations.

So yeah, the answer is that is that we need widespread sweeping policy chances specifically at the level of economics.

And.

It'S worth noting that conversation about grit in particular I think is problematic. I understand the intention of doing that kind of work, but I believe that it actually specifically draws attention away from.

The systemic issues. I remember because I tried to do education reform around standardized testing because standardized testing is one of those things that just punishes kids like 8th graders getting ulcers because of these standardized testing. And they know their teachers jobs dependent upon their performance and the whole school's pressure. It's crazy. And so I was looking at that and I remember another colleague, graduate student interested in grit making a very different argument about what to do with the standardized tests. No, but it's not the standard, it's not the test that's the problem. It's the kids need more grit. And I thought wow, that's really inhumane basically to see that there is to relocate what's actually a systemic problem as basically a failure of the individual.

So we need to be careful with that discourse, I think.

Well, let's explore that a little further. And obviously I think we both agree there's some kind of integral big map. It's a both and discussion. And certainly if you think of grid, it's just kind of a. Almost a genetic property that people are born with. Focusing on that I think is irrelevant in a sense. But if we do can think of individual resilience as trainable as a set of skills. You know, for example, if we're giving building mindfulness based emotional intelligence skills training into K through 12 education and other body mind disciplines and so forth and good communication skills, things that usually aren't part of the educational spectrum. Right. How to navigate this most complex system in the known universe, the human body, brain and nervous system and how to communicate with other beings to get our needs met in mutually beneficial ways. We don't teach that in school. So you know, if that was built in education, we could add individuals who are much more resilient as well as continuing to work on create systems that actually are supportive to people and humane.

I don't know which order to take these things in but one, because maybe we'll come back to this later, but I'm thinking if we start to experience breakdowns.

Perhaps climate change driven social, political, economic breakdowns, it's going to be really important for there to be resilient individuals around, however they got there, who can kind of plant the flag and say, hey, come over here, we're co creating safety here, we're co creating resilience here to become self organizing factors for emerging pods of resilience and safety and community that could network locally, regionally with other pods. In the face of some kind of breakdown, we're really going to need almost some super resilient people who could be those organizing principles.

And at the same time.

You mentioned things like debt forgiveness and so forth. I mean it seems like we just have to deal with these glaring inequalities nationally and globally that are there and find ways to do that and things like debt forgiveness and some kind of level of universal income. And all these things I think are really workable ideas and important ideas. And at the same time I'm wondering if you talk because there's in the current climate of applied postmodernism and what's been called woke politics and so forth, there's a very strong anti capitalistic bent that seems a bit naive to me. And clearly capitalism has its problems and needs to be much better regulated than it is now. But as a system it has produced more abundance and distributed more abundance than any other system we know of. How do you create a saner system that redistributes resources, opportunity and resilience in, in more just ways and still keep incentives in there? Because it seems like all the attempts to do that without.

Taking incentive out of the system haven't worked out so well. I'm curious about your thoughts about that.

Yeah, no, there's a lot in there.

So.

A few things to say. One is that, I mean you just have to note the conversations about capitalism in like Wokeism and then broadly social media and even in, even in good mainstream journalism, contrast capitalism with socialism and capitalism with communism as if we have these predefined either or choices between sweeping macroeconomic systems when this is not the case. If you look at what FDR did and you look at the way even our current economy is structured, it becomes.

A much more complex conversation.

Conversation about how to create value and distribute value, basically. And when you talk about national resiliency, like if we move up from the community, up from the individual community to nationality, economic inequality may be one of the factors that makes a nation the least resilient, that it could possibly be under strain.

Especially when you have the levels of resentment and distrust of government organizations. So like, it would be the equivalent of a person being completely at odds with itself, having focused just on one little part of its personality and neglected, let's say, for example, all of its lower chakra stuff and then been put in a situation of tremendous stress. Now what's going to happen? You're going to have very conflicting will.

You're not going to be able to.

Organize your activities coherently. And so at the national level, when you see this kind of economic inequality, it becomes both a social justice issue clearly. And I mean that in a very specific, Rawlsian sense. I wrote a book on social justice. I don't mean it necessarily in the broad sweeping way that the woke culture uses social justice, I think often incorrectly. But economic inequality is an issue of justice, but it is also an issue of national security. Like we are in an extremely vulnerable situation where the entire country is pitted against itself thinking that it's fighting an ideological battle, when really the issue has to do with the way we've been divvying up the creation of shared value. Which is to say.

As Rawls would.

Point out, like the position of the least well off needs to be attended to. You can judge a society not by the position of those who are most fortunate within it. If you're judging the society in terms of its qualities as a good society, you don't judge it by in terms of how well the best are doing. You judge the quality of a society by the position of the least well off. And could the other people in the society consent to being in the position of the least well off in that society if they couldn't and they're still reaping the benefits of the society which as a whole creates the value that they're extracting, Then we're in a difficult conversation about how to raise the position of the least well off. And it's not just giving them money like the other social miracles. They're conditioned. That means for the possibility of human development as the focus of the civilization Raising the condition of the least to well off is about the epistemological resources, resources of agency, resources of self understanding, self respect. Martha Nussbaum speaks about this. You know, where you've rolled out kind of social welfare programs, but accompanied by basically simplistic education and propaganda. And the people intended to benefit were actually infantilized and removed from being able to create like an agentic self understanding. And so I think that is, yeah, that's an important set of concerns. And the role of incentives in some places of social need is key. There are some places where markets are the best way to solve the problem. There are other places where markets are not the best way to solve the problem. I believe that education.

Healthcare and family systems are places where markets are not often the best way to solve the problem.

They can often create new problems.

But in places like technology, innovation and mining and other places there, it's like, yeah, let's put some incentives in place and let's go at it in a very creative way.

It's not an either or thing when you're thinking about the future of the economic system. And so I think that's the problem with the woke is that it's creating these polarizing, almost propagandized positions which are basically saying that we don't want to reason, we want to fight. And that's the problem with a self propagandized public sphere, which is what has been created in the United States. And so that's a powder keg because we've. And this is again back to the consilience project. We need to somehow rearrange the possibility for discourse here because too many of these terms have become weaponized, too many physicians have become entrenched.

Well, the current pandemic certainly shows one real tension point there with our public health system. So on the one hand.

Vaccines were discovered in record time, however people feel about vaccines and so forth. But it seems like it's going to be at least one key pathway for us to emerge out of this pandemic. And so it really was incentive based, market based, pharmaceutical system that really incentivize the science and the production of that. And on the other hand, we see this incredibly unequal distribution of the vaccines globally. And so we have a really strong.

Signaling there that public health should not be organized in a market approach, that we need a completely different approach to it, as you are pointing to. And at the other time, on the other hand, it seems like a lot of the technological side of medicine is well, driven by.

That, although it makes it very Expensive. So that's one of the conundrums we're in. You get the technological innovation, but if it's not regulated, then it makes it very expensive and we have the whole big mess we have in healthcare.

Yeah, it's complicated. I basically disagree.

The situation with vaccine development was as far from a market based innovation situation as you could have.

Markets are situations where the consumers have as much information as a seller and where you can walk away from the transaction. So when you have situations.

This occurs a lot actually in.

The medical field where it is, and vaccines in particular make this very complicated where you are mandated to consume the product. And in a situation of information, asymmetry means that it's not a market at all.

It's not a market situation.

You know, if you look at the position Pfizer was in in relationship to countries like Brazil and other countries in South America where they were charging quite a lot of money and seeking rights to seize the sovereign assets of those nation states as part of the loan agreement. You see that? Yeah, there's a, There's a much more.

There's a different way to have to conceive what happened. It wasn't a market based transaction.

I certainly see your point. At the consumer level, if you consider the market to be the government, you could still say it's somewhat of a market system, although obviously rife with potential for corruption and so forth. So maybe the better way to ask the question is how do you drive the scientific innovation we need in public health.

And at the same time not have public health simply be driven by market forces and corrupted by market forces?

Yeah.

Well, it's interesting because we are driving scientific innovation, but we are driving scientific innovation in those directions that are profitable. So there's a tremendous amount of scientific innovation that's not being driven because it's not profitable. So, for example.

Small molecule antivirals, which can be used to treat coronaviruses, have been on the market for 50, 60 years. They're outside of patent.

Doing scientific exploration of treatments using small molecule antivirals would not be profitable at all.

If I'm in a pharmaceutical company where I'm legally mandated to return to my shareholders as much profit as I can, and they're checking if I'm doing that and I lose my job, if I don't do that, then I simply, even if I wanted to, can't pursue that line of scientific advancement. So I pursue a line of scientific advancement that actually provides me with a technology that I could potentially monopolize the market with. Specifically a market that customers are mandated to consume within, which isn't the market.

That's an example where in fact, profit driven scientific innovation is not the way to drive scientific innovation. You can actually drive scientific innovation without using profit as the motive to string it along. And that's happened when, for example, we developed the atomic bomb to fight the fascists, where it wasn't. Precisely, it wasn't. It was in fact an effort that looked a lot like socialism where the government and everyone worked together to make something happen that would have been impossible.

To do by publicly funded science of some kind.

Yes, publicly funded science where you bring the best of the best together in a meritocratic system, not a market based system.

Clearly in the pharmaceutical embassy, the profit factor is incredibly problematic and keeps the focus off of preventive healthcare and preventive medicine and natural medicine and focuses it all on things you can have patents on and profit by.

Yeah, no, totally. It's probably one of the largest problems driving the athrogenic crisis crisis, which is a crisis of basically injury caused by medical treatment.

And.

Yeah, so that's precisely an example where I think markets shouldn't be in place.

And again, you'll note the difficulty of talking about these topics because of the nature of the informational environment that surrounds you and I. Right. So right now many people are wondering if I'm an anti vaxx.

And what that would mean if I was. And would that mean he supports Trump?

Right.

Would that mean a whole bunch of other things that now are inextricably tied to the debate, which has been radically oversimplified by the media, not with the intention of giving us all the information we need, but with the intention of nudging us as communication scientists towards a particular route of choice making. And so that I'm just noting that because I can feel it. I can feel the perception of the conversation and the difficulty of finding language that isn't going to be flashing a tribal gang sign as membership to one of these competing groups constructed by the media narrative. And so this is worth noting that. And now the question is, what's the listener doing when you've problematized that and called out the fact that you'd like to label me as an anti vaxxer and therefore put me in some predefined category.

That's interesting. There's a discourse problem and we've made it so that some conversations are not being had which should be had and people are not speaking when they should speak. And there's an inner duplicity which is again, a sign of A self propagandizing public sphere.

Yeah, that seems to be a critical point that you just brought out those flags that then completely tribalize the thing immediately so it shuts off all discourse.

Some of our audience may be aware of the recent rebel wisdom thing with Jordan hall and how conversations that there's just off limits. Right. And there's no way to have them safely in a public discourse without being attacked. So I'm wondering if we could explore what you've been learning about the information ecology and how to reinvent it almost. Because it seems like it's almost in a state of beyond repair possibly. And the work you've been doing in the Consilience project. And I wonder that maybe along with the notion of. It seems like even apart from the degradation of our information ecology, there's been a tendency for decades for us societally to turn over responsibility for all kinds of areas of our lives to experts, whether it's to school teachers in the school system for our children's education.

To the police and other authorities for public safety. And how involved do we even get in our neighborhoods anymore? Kids that are acting out of the neighborhood, do we get involved? Do we just call the cops? Right. I mean there's so many different levels where we've learned to depend on experts and abdicate our purse. So there's. And what it seems to drive is a disengagement. And it's really one, I think another way we've been optimizing society for individualism and not for any kind of collective shared responsibilities. Right. Other than what we can build in the system. But then as individuals, we operate as these lone wolves within these systems which are either supportive or not supportive. And it would seem like that level of level or lack thereof of civil engagement is tied very closely to the information ecology and how trustworthy it is. So I'm wondering if you could kind of explore that. What you've been learning over the last year as you've been diving into this.

That'S a very good way to tie it together. Because what you're looking at is.

A situation of designed epistemic dependency, which is what you're saying that we basically the fungibility of choice making, we put our choice making capacity into others hands. And that's how the society is basically built. And it's how education is built.

There was a move in changing education from being about rhetoric and the classic trivium to being about a certain kind of information transmission. This occurred in the 1800s and it was essential for building the kind of Industrial society that we began to build, where you had a community that was subsumed by an industrial net of specialists who became even more specialized. And it became impossible, the communication scientists said, for the everyday man in the masses to hold the sheer complexity of modern civilization. And so therefore, we have to find a way to allow them to be relieved of the responsibility of having to make such complex choices. And so this is like, again, the benevolent technocratic. Like a benevolent technocracy. These aren't bad guys. It's a legitimately complicated situation. Like, I don't know how to fix my car. I don't want to learn how to fix my car. I love having a mechanic that can fix my car. Again, it's this question of what kinds of things. Is that an okay situation where I kind of relinquish my epistemic authority to your expertise? And in what situation ought we be much more cautious about relinquishing that?

It ends up being a very complicated topic. And I think ultimately one of these topics in the philosophy of education, because ideally, the relationship you would have to an expert would be one of legitimate teacherly authority, where there's a known gradient of capacity.

And there's enough trust relationship that they actually, if you're willing, would want to bring you up to their level and allow you to see it from their perspective. It's legitimate teacherly authority. Instead, we end up having experts who don't relate to us with teacherly authority. They relate to us with a bureaucratic authority.

And that's different. And so this is one of the things we did with modernity. Max Weber talks about this. Many of the early sociologists pointed out that we began to replace the kinds of bonding and legitimacy created in community, where it's like, I've seen that guy fix scars, man. He knows how to fix cars. You can go there. You want to be in relationship to the expert insofar as you're curious. And he'll teach you if you want to know he's not trying to scam you. And everyone knows everyone. So you have the organic creation of legitimate teacher authority. These dynamics get replaced with instantiation of bureaucratic authority as a proxy for that. So that means when you're in the school as a student, the teacher's there telling you something, but her authority is a result of her bureaucratic position. That's not a result necessarily of the gradient in knowledge. And so we're in that position all over where it's like, okay, you've got that degree man on your wall behind you. But what you're saying right now doesn't make sense to me and you're not willing to explain it to me and I basically have to do what you're telling me. And that's kind of the Kafkaesque situation you get into when you're in this over bureaucracatized.

Where they fetishize expertise and understand that when you look at the development of the situation, medicine's another example with all the different professional societies.

There'S an incentive for them to create the sense of the expertise being as difficult as possible to achieve as difficult a language to learn that you couldn't apply to yourself and to create certifications. And the thing is the trappings of expertise, it's happening in psychology in particular.

So it's important to see that these are.

Emerged often in good faith. Which is to say, yeah, not everyone wants to learn to fix their car. Not everyone wants to become a medical expert. But then they became self fulfilling prophecies, they became, they made more of themselves. There was a market dynamic again to.

Hold that position as you're the only viable guy in town to do this. And oh, he thinks, no, he's not an actual expert. He didn't go through this course which I set up.

Which certifies the experts.

These professions really build those in to limit the size of the profession, to limit the market. That's. And but a point you made there really struck me. You're sitting there, this person's got their degree on the wall, they're the expert, they've got the bureaucratic authority. They're not making sense to you, they're not being in relationship with you. And yet you have to do what they say. I mean that's a bind to be in a cop gas bind to be in the pressure of that. And.

The less societal privilege that people have.

Correct.

The more of an untenable bind. That's going to be a crazy making bind. That's going to be. And to me that points back to this dealing with these inequalities issues because we were putting so many people in that kind of bind and that's crazy making and can lead people to just act out of desperation.

No, that's exactly right. And it's, you know, I've encountered it with legal, legal and medical situations where I've seen it hurt people the most. And so there's this classic idea in modern law that you should follow the law because you have to, but you should understand the law because it makes sense right now. That's the catch. There's many laws we have that just don't make sense. And so yeah, particularly people in extremely vulnerable positions are put under the thumb of law. And like the war on drugs is a good example where it's like this that make sense. Like I actually understand what you're saying, but are you paying attention? This doesn't make sense. And it's the soul destroying Kafka esque experience of being on the receiving end of a large impersonal civilization. And similar with the pandemic public health type things, the info landscape was so disrupted that it became very hard to.

Feel the, the rationality and reasonableness behind the recommendations. They're moving this way, that way. So I think a lot of people have been feeling that in the clutches of something which can't be reasoned with. And this was the whole point of the Enlightenment and the getting rid of the divine right of kings and the feudal system was to allow people to live in a society where they felt that reasons mattered and that they weren't subject to anonymous impersonal forces that wielded illegitimate authority. That they were the source of authority somehow through a situation of public choice, public sense making.

And that's the hunger actually came from that soul destroying sense of inescapable irrational power. And again, this is like a dark picture and of course not all professionals are doing this, but there are definitely spots one can get put in these days where that situation is quite acute. And it's a form of injustice that's hard. It's hard to speak to because it's hard to feel it. That woman, I forget her name now, she wrote a book called Epistemic Injustice. It was about specifically that. It was about absence of trust in your testimony, absence of listening to your reasons.

Yeah, yeah. I think of a young person, especially young person of color who's sitting there and some public defender who's got a million people on their caseload could care less whether they're innocent or guilty and just tell them, look, you can go to court and maybe get 30 years in prison or I'll plea bargain you to five years. What do you want to do?

Maybe we could with the time we have left, start exploring a little bit where I go.

Maybe what you're learning and what it's going to take to rebuild the information ecology. And also some of your ideas in terms of our education system, which I know is a big focus of yours. And the little bit I know about the Conciliation project, I listened to Daniel Smockenberg talk about it at length on a podcast a while back and it seemed like it was going to.

It's a series of concentric circles. In a sense. The inner circles are going to require some people with some pretty high level expertise to do sense making in a very sophisticated way. But at every level it requires engagement. So it's going to require all of us to actually engage in the process of sense making at some level, according to our abilities. And it seems like there's a similar process in reimagining our education system. So I wonder if you could start talking about maybe the way out of where we are in the sense of.

That and they're completely related. It's. Yeah. So the Consilience project, and I see it as a continuation of my education reform work. Essentially.

The goal of the project is to create the kind of society that I was just describing, where people feel like they have voice and actually have resources, they need to understand the most consequential problems, that interference isn't being run between them and reality, that there's actually they have the tools, they have access to reality. And so it starts with.

Core foundational work on diagnosing the situation that we're in and understanding the dynamics. So there's this core set of social philosophy that's going to be written in conjunction with a wide swath of scholars, actually. Then there's what I've already said, meta news analysis and situational assessments, where we apply the theory to analyzing the media environment with meta news analysis and then analyzing the state of the world with situational assessments. And now this forms a core set that acts as a catalyst, basically, and as like a bat signal to attract those people who are aware of the crisis within the information commons, basically. So if you imagine the environmental movement before Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, there were many people who were aware that there was an environmental crisis, but there was no banner under which or even terminology they could use to describe themselves.

We were in that situation now with people who are aware of the educational and informational crises, who are aware of the breakdown in public sense making. And there's many, many, many people working on this problem, like many people. And so one of the goals here is to create that set of frameworks and even a platform with forums and other aspects that get a movement building around.

Solving this problem of public sense making and returning to, or maybe for the first time, actually creating a society that's actually about collective governance, that's about cooperative deliberative democracy. And so that's the goal. And then it's a five year project so we build this core set of tools and resources, the movement congeals around it and then we pull out after five years. But the movement keeps going. Because one of the key things to get is that again with the expertise thing, you know, it's illegitimate teacherly authority. If it's not willing to make itself obsolete. A good teacher will actually seek to be replaced by their student. A bad teacher will always keep the student in a subservient position. This is an insight actually I got from Ken Robert's work on legitimate and illegitimate spiritual teacherly authority. Just so you know, back in like the 80s. Yeah. So the Consilience project doesn't want people to just become addicted to the Consilience Project the way they're addicted to the New York Times. Like we have to return responsibility to epistemic responsibility to the people basically. But to do that requires resourcing the environment pretty drastically.

Yeah. One of the great examples always comes to mind for me is the 12 step work that's benefited so many people. And how many people are Even aware of Dr. Baba and Bill W. The founders who literally turned it over and put this out into the world. And you have this very non hierarchical grassroots global movement that continues to help people which requires very little central control. It's an incredible example of that.

So you're creating.

This core for the consultants project of a way to process information in a more trustworthy way that can then expand out and people can engage with at various levels. So how might that work in our education system? What is the catalyst that could start shifting our education system in a new direction? Has anything of the pandemic begun to tilt us in that way? Clearly parents were forced to be more engaged in their children's education. But my sense, it was mostly still a download process driven over line. But I'm just wondering if there's any openings here that might leverage something new emerging.

Yeah, I mean in my book, which is again before the pandemic, I said basically a situation is going to come with. Schools won't be able to run and we'll have to have something like a backup generator that we can turn on that's a distributed educational hub network that's digitally enabled.

And that's basically what happened. Now the problem was we hadn't already built this alternative network of digitally enabled educational hubs where every home becomes a classroom, but we knew it was possible. So it was cobbled together basically. But the possibility was realized that oh, okay, like the way we've organized schools during modernity to build these Giant buildings to like bus kids in for like 45 minutes to age, segregate them and put them in these desks that all look the same. And all of that stuff and the critiques of it which still ended up making schools, by the way, this notion that some new possible form of educational organization could emerge. Now I also located dystopian school scenarios along the same route, which is to say a lot of what's happened is now kids sitting alone in this room six hours a day in front of this computer being fed some state curriculum. So that could happen as well. We could get profit oriented educational innovation, which is already happening. But there is an opening, there's an opportunity. I don't think we're simply going to put the school back together the way they were. I think we're going to get a tremendous amount of variability in the book. I also said we're going to see radical and increasing stratification of educational opportunity, that the top's going to get even better and the bottom is going to get even worse and the distance is greater and there's more spread. And that's I think important to get that it's not. What happened with the pandemic education situation, wasn't all the kids in the United States had the same experience? No. In fact, this past year we've had more diversity of total experience of what's happening for a kid when they say I'm in school than maybe ever with the range of like some kids having a way better, more educational time with their family in a place where they can go outside. Maybe their family's sophisticated enough to create a pod and they have a whole homeschooling thing that emerges, which the parents wanted to do anyway. And like all that stuff has happened. And then you also have the kid sitting alone in an inner city project in front of a computer with no assistance from his parents who had to go work because they're essential workers and with no attention from the teachers because she's got 40 kids now, has never had to do that before. And that kid learned nothing and probably actually regressed skill capacity. And so this diversity of experience, we're going to have to grapple with that in the coming years. And we're also going to have to grapple with the demonstrated fragility of the complicated, massive school bureaucracies which simply couldn't accommodate the strain on the system put on them by the pandemic when it was clear. I mean, even here in Vermont, like you'll have snow, you'll have snow days and you'll have snow weeks if there's serious snow. And why not just have something you could easily boot up that would be ready to go, that would empower parents and equip parents. So the educational hub network I propose in my book.

Is a version of that on steroids, where I basically say, hey, let's dismantle the schools and replace them with much more local community hubs that are a mixture of a co working center, a daycare, a museum, a library.

Or teacher. Citizen scientists who are sometimes parents, due to the basic income guarantee and debt forgiveness, can now spend 20 hours a week. So it's a whole vision that includes the social miracles that re empowers the community around the distributed educational hub network. And actually, because jobs are being automated and because other things are happening, the focus of the community is now not necessarily economic productive activity, although it's still happening. The focus is actually intergenerational transmission. And that's a different vision of society that I kind of cap the book off with is that notion that replacing endless profit maximization as a generator function for civilizational innovation with human growth, human potential and education as the focus of civilizational innovation.

Then the whole civilizational stack unfolds in a different way. And you're still doing value distribution and value creation and you're food is being made, all these things are happening. But all the excess value doesn't get popped up into fictitious capital. It gets recycled back down into the human itself as the core of the educational focus of the community. So that's the broader vision eventually that the book lays out. And I think the disruption, like we shook the Etch A Sketch, we shook the Etsy. So in terms of the education system, the pandemic was disruptive enough to allow something truly innovative to happen. And so God willing, there'll be real innovation and we won't just try to cobble it together.

So that's a little bit of what I hope is possible.

Well, that's such an extraordinary vision and exemplary of the classic sense of the good, the true and the beautiful. I mean, just everything about it shines with, with human beauty and makes so much sense. Right. And clearly we can't, we can't transform any of these complex systems in isolation. So what you're pointing to is this broad and also brings to mind one of our presenters in the summit, Larry Mercury, who is Inuit Unangan elder, talked about, you know, we've just really gotten the whole thing upside down over time. And it's all about really, it's a heart change. We have to reconnect with our hearts in order to start to get our. All. Our whole approach to how we're living together on this planet right side up again. And just division you were describing seemed to really exemplify that, so. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for this time, Zach. This has been. I mean, there's so many threads of inquiry here, and I hope it's going to simulate lots of conversations for our viewers, and. And it's just such a rich landscape, and I really appreciate your time and. And that you're. That you're out there doing the work you're doing to keep, you know, keep imagining what's possible, because we can't imagine it. We're not going to do it. Right. And so such important work. Thank you very much.

Yeah. Thank you. It was an honor. Thank you.

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