The Power of Agency - A Conversation with Indra Adnan

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

I feel as if there needs to be a moment of acknowledgement, at least within the educational system, that we need to move into some sort of mutual learning space between younger people and older people. It's the same as in a family. At some point the parents say, okay, you know, show me who you are and I'll do my best to support you becoming that person. That moment needs to arrive now.

Hi, and welcome back for the final episode of this summer term of the Future Learning Design Podcast. My name's Tim Logan, and the podcast is brought to you in partnership with Notosh. This episode is a lovely conversation with Indra Adnan about the power of agency. Agency is a word that comes up a lot in educational conversations now about how do we empower young people to take on more responsibility and active participation in their own learning. But it's also a concept called is much broader than just education as we think about political, institutional, and systems change. Indra is the founder and co-initiator, together with Pat Kane, of the Alternative UK political platform. She's been writing consistently about soft power, public diplomacy, and the power of attraction and relationship in international relations in major UK and US publications. Indra is also a psychosocial therapist, founder of the Soft Power Network. She's consulted to the World Economic Forum, Indian, Finnish, and Danish governments, NATO, the Scottish Executive, and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, amongst others. Indra is also the author of The Politics of Waking Up: Power and Possibility in the Fractal Age.

Welcome, Indra.

Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. There's a, a really important connection, I think, with your work that I've made, that is a term that comes up a huge amount in all of the different calls to change education is agency. And it's a strange word. It's quite a cold word that some people don't connect with, but I think it speaks to something quite deep and important about how do we meet young people and enable them to become and give them space for that. But it's, yeah, it's at the heart of a lot of the conversations around educational change and your work. Obviously has been really tending to that concept really as one of the core ideas. So yeah, firstly, lovely to meet you and thank you so much for joining.

Oh, thanks. I'm so excited to be here. I think we're gonna have a great conversation.

Lovely.

Yes, absolutely. So just maybe by way of, so that people are aware of kind of what your story is and where you're coming from, I think the concept of adaa seemed to be, as I've understood it, quite an important one in your own journey and exploration. So maybe, yeah, perhaps we could start there if you wouldn't mind just like giving some of the journalism backstory to how you discovered the idea and then maybe moving into what the idea actually means.

Yeah, and I'm going to be a problematic interviewee because you actually brought up the word agency. In terms of my own personal history, I think that's the core question. And if you don't mind me going back to that, then I can put that into things better after that. Because the word agency, a lot of people will be making assumptions about that when I speak about Addaa. So let's, let's start with that, if you don't mind. And also it's an important indication of, you know, the passage of time as well. So if I was going to pinpoint the definitive moment or the situation in which I began my journey, which has ended up where we are today, was to do with time in my teens when my family started to go through some very, very difficult times. So we had moved from Holland to London. We were 3 girls and 1 boy. My father is Indonesian, my mother is Dutch. I mean, that in itself is interesting, like colonizer and colonized.

Yeah, exactly.

In one, but quite a common combination, I have to say, in Holland. We moved to London. My father had an international job, so we were moving very comfortably. It wasn't, you know, a difficult move. Different. And yet all the same conditions prevailed around the difficulty of landing in a new country with a very particular culture. We were fine and happy in a way until— and I moved when I was 3— until one night when I was 11, out of the blue, we suddenly heard that my brother, who was still living in Holland— he hadn't moved with us, I should have said— we still live in Holland, had been involved in a very serious car crash. And that night 11-year-old young girl, you know, actually at a convent school, I battled with, you know, life itself. You know, in a way I remonstrated with God and said, you know, to save my brother. It was, it was just like this for 6 hours. It was like a real trauma experience, if you like, to really battle with God and to go through every permutation in my mind as a child that this had to happen, only to discover in the morning that I'd failed, you know, my brother had died. This set up a huge path for me really as a child. First of all, the idea, you know, that I'd been abandoned by God, you know, the idea that I had no power whatsoever. And then over the next 7 years to watch my parents really in a way disintegrate into so many, you know, us as a family. My mother who had 7 brothers and sisters, saw 6 of them die of cancer while I was still in my teens. She became very depressed. She was a, a beautiful, strong woman who became very like a shadow of herself. And my father, who was also a strong character, you know, in the public life that I was enjoying, he was, he was reduced really by all of this that happened. And as a child, I wanted just to exempt myself from this, and I went into my in a way it was a very dissociated state, what I now understand as a psychosocial therapist, where I made my own world in which I was developing my own idea of what life was.

Right.

I struggled to stay in touch with my brother. I didn't want to accept that he was passed, and I think I managed to do that. So in those years, I built a kind of a spiritual life for myself and even what I thought was a spiritual practice that I nursed this idea that one day I was going to share this practice with the whole world. And because I was able to somehow even myself out and be in touch with my aunts, my uncles, my brother. But I was very dissociated from the real life. And at school I became quite strange, I think. And I was good at school. I could certainly, you know, jump all the hurdles. I did well enough. But I think the way I would describe myself now is I wasn't much fun, you know, really growing up. And then after school and I went to uni and it didn't really change that much. But then I went to Indonesia and to discover my roots really. And these are the days when there was no easy access to anything. You know, I couldn't even phone home very— I'd have to use a landline to phone home. So it really was another aspect of me going alone. And what I discovered when I was in Indonesia was that I had an uncle— well, this is Indonesian really, an uncle's a friend of the family, right?

Yeah.

Was an uncle in the family who'd started a Buddhist movement in the mountains. And this was a Japanese Buddhist movement actually that he learned from his wife that he'd met in Japan. But it was just phenomenal because what you heard was that people were, you heard on the grapevine that people of all classes, and Indonesia was still very, there was great gaps still between the rich and the poor in at that time.

Okay.

That still is to some extent. But the, you know, people, wealthy people, people of many different cultures, you know, poor people all gathering at this mountaintop, listening and sharing practice. And then sleeping overnight in this kind of makeshift gathering space, completely unheard of. And then, you know, tidying up and making their own food together. I mean, it was a social phenomenon that something was going on here and I wanted to write about it. So I was actually working for, strangely, a magazine in London that I'd won a competition to write for. So I went there as a journalist and I thought, oh right, this is a, you know, some sort of thing that's happening and I could write home about it. And I met them. And I was very deeply, strangely affected right from the word go. I could feel that there was something here in this practice that was gonna change, but I didn't start to practice with them. I kept a healthy distance, what I thought, and just wanted to observe their practice. One of the things they would regularly do is to go out into the villages around, this was Bandung, so the villages around Bandung and go as far as they could actually sometimes quite remote parts of Indonesia to visit people in their villages there.

Right.

And at the time, something again that most people can't imagine, the military government of the time was doing an extraordinary thing of delivering food parcels all the way throughout Indonesia. And Indonesia has 13,000 islands. I'm not saying they reached every one of those 13,000 islands, but they were reaching well into the unknown territory, if you like, of Indonesia. And so the upside of that was some sort of poverty was beginning to be addressed, but the downside of it was that people were becoming quite passive. In a sense, they were, they began to be quite dependent on these food parcels and that's how we found them, you know, in these villages, still somewhat united around the leadership in the village, which was at the time, you know, like a local law called adat, adat, you know, which is maybe indigenous structures, but within a 93% Muslim country. So there was a Muslim country by this time, but it also had within that this adat, you know, the local laws and the indigenous wisdom that existed. And this is what, what we would find. We'd arrive as a group, maybe 10 or 12 people. My uncle would speak, you know, for 10, 20 minutes to the group that was gathered. And then I would listen to him speak and I couldn't speak Indonesian myself. So I was listening just really to his voice and to the kind of cadence of his language and what he was saying. And I heard, I kept hearing him say this word, ada, ada, you know, so I would, you know, I got curious and I asked him after, you know, 'Ada' mean? And he, he explains it to me like this. It simply means it's there, right? So it'd be an answer to, you don't think you have any resources, they're there. You know, you don't think you're strong enough, you are. You don't think there's any hope for the future, there is. So it was this kind of confirming word that, that sort of envelops everything, you know, to say and to invite them to consider that the problems they had in their hand, you know, the solutions were already present. And how could we reach those solutions? So, you know, when I watched them take this on as an idea, which was a crazy idea, really looking at these villages, you know, small neighborhoods, you know, with homemade houses and no access to water, they'd have to walk 20, you know, half an hour water, nothing growing, just reliant on these food parcels. The young people quite disaffected, but still held together by a family structure. It was difficult to believe that that might be the case. After the lecture, we do this chanting together, which was a Buddhist chanting, and then discussion.

Right.

And then he would recommend a certain amount of reading of these letters, scriptures. So we'd leave it there. It sometimes, it would never take, it'd take one day and one night. We'd just spend time with them talking and then we'd leave, you know, and, and leave it open if they wanted us to visit again. Mm-hmm. You know, in this case in Talawa, maybe 6 weeks later, the one I'm describing in particular, coming back, it was quite remarkable how different the place was already. People had gone maybe to the river and start to create a system of bringing water to the village with pumps. You know, space had been cleared for roads to be start building. People had started to plant things in their backyards. And also very significantly, children were moving out of the houses of their parents into a nearby house. So the village was beginning to be extended. But mostly it was about this flurry of ideas that was coming. And then we did the same thing again. We would, or my uncle would talk, they would chat. But this time when people were chatting, it was so much more vibrant. You know, there was a lot of chat. And the thing that I noticed most was that the young people were speaking up. There was something braver about their way of being in that place. And they were speaking up and, and there was a lot of laughter. So something ontological had shifted. There was, it wasn't so much they'd received this blueprint and they were following it. It was more to do with the space has sort of come alive somewhat. There was an aliveness about the space. And, you know, I saw that pattern again and again. Before suddenly out of the blue, I was called back to London and because my sister was getting married and then I thought that I was gonna go back to Indonesia after that. But as history would have it, I never went back, but I carried that with me.

Yeah.

So you, you might say everything sort of started there from the premise that at the core of my searching was this question of what is agency? You know, where is my power in this world? And then in a way, going through the whole educational experience and not answering that question. You know, the question was really being held outside of my educational experience, you know, going to Indonesia and then experiencing something I couldn't really explain. But that was a very direct response to my search. Yeah, because I saw there that there was something that I wasn't really considering around where is my agency. And it was something around the shift from my head, you know, working it all out to something much more holistic than that, that there's something about literally coming back to life. There's a coming back to aliveness that is the core of the opportunity in front of us. And then how do we make sense of that in our real life? You know, so if one was to go back to Talawa now, all that time, it's a little town now. It's not a little village anymore.

Yeah.

But, you know, and it's taking part in a much bigger revolution that's happened also in Indonesia-wide. There's lots to say about all of that, but it's like watching something sparked a seed growing, a little green shoot, and now you've got something of a plant there.

Yeah. Amazing. No, well, I mean, personally, thank you, cuz it's, I mean, it's incredibly personal, you know, thing that you've experienced, but I think the, what you say there about the fact that this, this idea of where is your power and what agency is, is held outside of education, I think is You know, that really gets to the heart of a lot of the exploration that I'm doing because it's, and, and as I say, it's more and more coming into education to ask how does it fit if we really ask that question within the current structures of education and why is it important, you know? And, and that's the thing that I find so powerful about the story is that there's something, it's kind of gesturing towards this deeper human essence or, you know, what, what, whatever the word you might use for it, but that is transcends culture. It's that you are searching for it in those moments of grief and trauma after your brother. And then, but you're also seeing it play out in a completely different context. And so I think it speaks to something, something about what it really deeply means to be human, to experience that ability to act or the, you know, power's a problematic word, but you know, maybe we'll get onto that. But yeah, just that the agency and ability to act. And I think it has very definitely over the last few hundred years, the education system has not been structured around nurturing that. It's been structured around other questions, you know, about transmission and, and all of those things. But just if I can, just to ask, with the concept of ada in Indonesia, did you feel, or have you learned since? Because clearly it wasn't just your uncle coming in and, you know, saying some magical words. And, and I think, you know, we have a propensity to sometimes valorize the charismatic leaders, right, who come in and say the right things, and then we put them on stages and suddenly, you know, it's not that that's happening. There's something else that's happening. So I, I wondered what, how would you describe how the concept of adaa connected into a broader, I don't know, cultural context and learning in that place in terms of why it kind of caught, like you said, you know, the spark. How would you kind of explain that phenomenon, I suppose?

Yeah. I mean, it's interesting because the way that you experience something cannot be undone.

Yeah.

Right. So for me, that is how I learned it. There was somebody in my environment who introduced me to something. However, uh, he didn't try to then define my experience after that. So, I mean, the question itself is interesting to me because it, it maybe implies, do we need leaders or not? And my instant reply, well, we need leaders., but leaders have nothing to do unless there are seekers.

Mm-hmm.

You know, so to be a seeker might be even more important than being a leader. And to be a seeker is not a small thing. Most of us, and, and I'm gonna make some broad statements, you know, but in the public space, you know, we characterize ourselves as being educated and we, we're knowers really. We know stuff, you know, and we apply the stuff that we know and we revere the people who know more than us. However, when we're in the kind of holy crisis that we're in now, you know, we have to somewhat step outside of the knowing we have to become seekers of new knowledge. When you become a seeker of new knowledge, there's a danger that you think you are the teacher or that you are the leader of that process, whereas actually what you're looking for all the time is new inspiration. You're looking for keys, you know, you're looking for insights, you're looking for revelations because, you know, how else can your thirst for new knowledge be answered? And that's, I think that, you know, in our kind of environment, Tim, we're, you know, we are a collection of seekers. We'd happily acknowledge that and we name curiosity as important and, you know, all this language. However, there's a lot in this system that claims to be the knower already. You know, there's a lot of settlement with certain kinds of views, or there's a lot of people setting themselves up as gurus of a new insight. You know, it's all endemic in the system. So in a way, we don't really escape anything when we simply step outside and set into a whole new arena of people answering people's problems. And I'm saying that to myself as well, because I know that, for example, when I was in that Buddhist movement, that I very quickly, when I moved to London, I became part of an international movement there. I was very quickly being set up myself as a person who knew, and I stepped out of that as well. So always stepping outside of traps where you become, you know, the all-knower and people come to you for the answers, but you've moved out of the real dialogue between seeker and, you know, provider of insight. If both don't have both, then the system itself is in danger of retreating. If you're going to keep progressing and keep growing and keep evolving, then the way to be is to— the way that I'm teaching myself to be, let's put it that way, is to be always open, desperate for the new knowledge actually, but also willing to impart the knowledge I have, to not pretend I don't have anything to give.

Exactly.

So what kind of containers can hold that willingness to at once be able to give and to receive is not easy to find in our public space. However, one of the key aspects for me of Ada is, you know, moving from the public space into the private space, you know. So the public space might present you with all these problems. You know, we are in the polycrisis. You know, our politics is broken. There are, you know, dangerous elements in my neighborhood. However, in the private space, because we're more directly involved, we have evolved many ways of overcoming these kinds of problems. You know, we are capable on the whole of, you know, getting over our fights with the people around us. We are capable of bringing up families of very diverse elements. You know, anybody who's got 2 or more kids will know that Each child grows up as a very different entity, and within a family that's really accentuated, you know, the differences between them. However, we're capable, you know, of holding a family together on the whole. I'm not saying, obviously, if we overfocus on dysfunctional families, then that argument does go out the window. But the idea of a family, the way it naturally occurs, it's capable of growing and bringing onto the public stage individuals that are quite differentiated. You know, they're not all the same. It's not required for everyone to be the same. To be together. So all of these lessons that we also learn at community level, you know, how to get along with our neighbors, how to be able to live in a place where there's very diverse inputs into that place. We have capabilities. You know, I spent 2 years with social workers, for example, Pat Kane and I, we worked for 2 years on something called Reimagining Social Work. And it was a game changer for us because we never really understood the capacity of social workers to hold the fabric of society together at the level they do. We only ever hear about the bad stories, right? But the work that they're doing on a daily basis, holding people from falling off the edge of society, is extraordinary. And that's what I mean by ada. You know, there is a level of intelligence, a capability that exists below the surface of public life that we take for granted. This, it either gets paid extremely badly or it's not paid for at all. So it's not part of the economy as we understand it. We don't value it actively, and it's never really posited as the way to go when we face the global crisis that we have. And I think really that my book is about how those human structures that have been distorted a lot by the demands of the growth economy and a certain patriarchal, you know, method of making progress has hidden our true capacities as human beings to be able to meet the crisis.

Yeah, it's fascinating. I mean, there's a huge amount in what you've just said. One of the things I just wanted to pick up was the idea that it's, and I, I thought it as you were describing the scene again in, in Indonesia, is these are not empty platitudes of trust, right? These are not saying, oh, you know, everything will be all right. You've got what you need. Like, come on, let's just all work together and it'll all be fine. It's, it's not that, right? It's not just naive optimism or whatever you wanna call it. It's something else going on, which is an acknowledgement of the depth of capacity that humans have, that we all have. And as you said, and they show up in so many different aspects of our lives personally, but somehow those, the way that we might navigate a personal crisis or a personal relational crisis or positive aspect, you know, the way that we inhabit our humanity with each other in private spaces is not allowed into the public institutions and the public spheres because it's somehow seen as lesser than. And I mean, I've had kind of a parallel conversation just about the embodied practice of, you know, more and more people talking about embodied learning. And it's almost a similar thing. It's that, that physical aspect of who we are as humans is deemed as lesser than. And actually the, the important valued work is the public, the cognitive, the, you know, the intellectual rather than the, as Nora would describe, messy, you know, squirmy aliveness, right? And, and so somehow there's something about without really acknowledging our creatureliness.

There you go.

There's another word for the Nora would use, our deep humanness to navigate spaces and build relationships and do all of those things, which we are deeply evolved to do, but we tend to somehow ignore them and pretend that this space above almost that, you know, we, we use the language of above and transcend those kinds of lesser, lower ways of being. And I think there's, there's something really important there about removing that hierarchy of ways of knowing and being. It speaks to the knowledge point that you were making as well, is that, you know, we, there's something about the intuitive and the implicit knowing that we have. And that's part of the seeking rather than this expertise master knowledge. Not that that's not important, but that it, if we only value that part where then we set up the hierarchical relations of teacher and student. So yeah, I don't know. There's some interesting things going on there.

Yeah, I mean, what I love about Nora's work and what you're highlighting here is that it's not always cognitively easy to really describe.

Right.

You know, so, and that's partly because the language we have belongs to a certain era and we share a language that allowed a certain kind of structure to arise, you know, within our public space.

Yeah.

That's hard to get away from actually. You know, even when I was writing my book, I felt that I couldn't really deliver the real experience of what I had because it was still in, in this language and it was still in this sentence structures and it was still, so even as much as I wanted to write the book, because you have to do that at some point, you know, say this is where I stand so that people know, it feels very, very first step to me because for me it's much more important to develop practice and experience between people. And, you know, the main message of the book, I guess, is that if we allow ourselves to, you know, to gather as humans in the most human way possible, it's really through the relationship between people, the beingness of each other together, that is the most educational thing that you can do. You know, to feel what happens to you when you're talking to someone who's either the same as you or different from you, or, you know, speaking in a way that you like or the way that you don't like, or what happens when the tribe gathers or when you lose it. I mean, there's some— it's all really to do with being able to understand what you're feeling and thinking in relationship to what's going on around you, which, you know, sometimes, you know, you can override it by previous expectations. Oh, what I'm feeling now is this, or what I'm— it's like you translate it into something that fits into the old order, if you like, and you're not really up for something entirely new.

It's great. It's, it's, yeah, we're meandering around all sorts of interesting ideas, but maybe just to bring it, if I can just bring it back to learning and education, because I think one of the other insights is that some of these conversations have deep traditions. They're not new. And whether you're bringing it from a spiritual or philosophical tradition of inquiry and seeking, or you are bringing it from, for example, the Bildung tradition that you reference in the book. I do a lot of work with Lena Rachel Anderson as well. I think that the idea of bildung is a deep and important one because it speaks to this learning to be human idea that again, has come from multiple traditions, Ubuntu, and, you know, from all over the world. So I think one of the things I'm keen to make the connection for people is that it's not that these are shiny new innovative examples of new, never thought before practice. There are some deep traditions that we can connect into. So, but I, but I can also, I can also imagine what you're thinking in relation to the fact that we also need some quite radically new ideas and structures. Because if I can, one of the things you say in the book is what is needed today is a completely new political idea that puts the need for human agency rather than abstract ideology at the heart of its project. And I think that quote speaks to, yes, we, we do need a new framing or a new set of technology, social technologies, or whatever the language you want to use. But at the same time, they draw on a depth of tradition in multiple spaces that I think is also important.

Yeah. I mean, listen, I'm not, I, of course, yes, I'm going to say yes to everything you are saying there. And you know, the andness of this is that if you look at it from a historical point of view, uh, and you're looking backwards to previous civilizations almost, you know, where different ideas of community existed, you know, maybe go back to indigenous communities, or I think there's value in that as long as you remember that you're— there's two things I would say. One is that you're hearing about them through the language and the structures of academia mostly, you know, there are important elements there. However, still those, a lot of those communities, not all of them, but many of them were still led by men. And, you know, also here we are today. This is one of my constant thoughts about when people reach back to, you know, hunter-gatherers or they might reach back to indigenous societies. Let's see what we can glean, but also let's address the fact that here we are today in this state. So there's something about the past, whether it's the lack of agency that was available But why? That has to be taken, I would say, in, from an evolutionary point of view. So whatever, however we've got to this point now, and I would say that we've been in this revolution of the internet for 30 years, right? Which I think is very significant, which has given us access to all sorts of information we didn't have. We're digging into this knowledge and bringing it to the surface, but we are not in comparable conditions anymore. We can't directly apply what we've learned from the past to the present because we're in very, very different conditions. Plus, the problems of the past, or the weaknesses of the past that allow this situation now to pertain, still exist. So we have to be careful about relying on the past as a source of information, you know, because A, A, conditions are different, but B, it still led us to this point. You know, the past led us to the present. There's no denying that, right? And so we have to take responsibility for this moment, whatever happens. You can create value from the past for sure, but don't let that absolve you from the new conditions of the present. And they are positive and negative. That for me also is absolutely crucial. If we're looking at it from an evolutionary point of view, and this is where I bring young people in particular, our capacities for the future are far more than they've ever been. We are able to observe, we are able to make things happen, we are able to connect with each other, we're able to understand. There's so much more capacity for a future that needs to unfold than has ever been present in global society.. And, you know, I, I want to invite young people into that space of you are uniquely formed to be capable of the future.

Yeah.

And, you know, we all have been trained in different ways, but there's, there's nothing to compare to the way that generation have been trained into the present. So that means for me that they got their education, you know, I can't put an actual figure to it, but let's say they maybe got about 15 to 20% of their education from school. And, you know, as much as 80% of what they know came from being, you know, online in the World Wide Web in connection with each other, for good or for bad.

Yeah.

And they're uniquely capable of that. And, you know, sometimes the way we know that they're uniquely capable is because they can describe their dilemma so much better than we ever could.

Yeah.

You know, one really good example that when I was working with Perspectiva about a year ago, a young person had come on board to be the researcher and we were talking about what is this moment in a way. And she led me to, she said, Indra, I think you'd be really interested in this hashtag #corecore on TikTok. And you know, I was always looking for these kind of recommendations. Where's the discourse? You know, where is the cutting edge really? And corecore seemed to be, even by the term, you're like, not just the core of our, you know what I'm saying? But the core of the core, you know, where are we really at now? And I went to look at that and I found some videos that were really kind of gobsmacking, actually. And there was something like, on the one hand, they were really profoundly depressing. Like, I don't want to get out of bed. I don't even know what to make of this life. You know, I can barely go forward. You know, young people making these kinds of videos. But there was always somewhere there was a demand in there. And the demand was something like, I don't want to work for someone who cannot see me as a human being. I mean, that is such a demand from a young person. And then there was all sorts of language coming out of that. You know, what does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be a human being? And if you want to employ me, what am I asking of you to see me in this way? Honestly, there's very few adults who really get what is being asked for there.

Yeah.

You know, because we've just been persuaded most of our lifetimes to give most of our life away to something we don't even understand, which turns out was the growth economy. We never understood that. We never understood all the stuff we were buying was just feeding that, that we were being hijacked entirely by advertising companies to hijack our emotional needs, you know, answer it with consumerism. And we were hooked for life. We never understood any of that. These kids get it. They just say, no, I don't want it.

Yeah.

You know, I can see it and I don't want it. That demand in the depths of their despair was, gave me incredible hope actually, because if they know what they're fighting for, then there's some chance that they'll get it.

Yeah. I love the idea that there is an evolution of agency, right? So it's not that it's been that kind of almost universal human essence that I was trying to describe earlier is it's almost like that evolves and grows with the, you know, the scale of the possibilities as they, you know, it's almost exponential, right? It's, there's something really interesting there about that ability to, yeah, respond to the question, what is the world asking of me now? And that's very different to what it was in the past. And I, I totally hear what you're saying. The only, the only point at which I would just put a little bookmark in is that the we is very diverse. You know, so the experiences of people in, you know, Sub-Saharan Africa as a young person in this moment is very different to, you know, in the post-capitalist. And I, I'm not saying there are not similarities and connections, but I'm just saying there is, there is a diversity of experience. That exists now, just in the same way that it did in the past. And to your point about the fact that we, yes, the lens that I am learning about Bildung, for example, through is a very particular lens and it's been decontextualized and it's not experiential and it's academic and all of those things. There is a, a way in which we still get trapped by decontextualizing and describing universality of experience in, in different ways. So there's something, I think there's something important there.

Absolutely. And, and, and this is where we might say let's invite the difference between, you know, being a spiritual human being and being a material human being, right? You know, because in a way, spiritual experience can sometimes universalize everything, you know. So you imagine that as I may be speaking now, right, that my sense of human agency, you know, suddenly you've got to apply that to the reality of everybody's lives. Does everybody have this possibility? Well, from a spiritual point of view, the answer is always going to be yes. You know, you, you feel that that is possible. And essentially my experience in Indonesia was spiritual material. It was exactly where the spiritual met the material, because if those people had not been somewhat inspired by the spiritual conviction, you know, of that leader, they wouldn't have tried. To make a difference to their material lives. So there's always a relationship between those things. If it didn't make any real difference to the material lives and they only felt better, then that also wouldn't be that useful. There has to be a relationship between those things. And in Buddhism, we call it the three proofs. You know, it has to have a— there has to be a theoretical proof, you know, like the idea that something's possible. And then there has to be a logical proof. You know, is this logical? Beyond the theory, you know, if this happened, then that would happen. But there has to be a real actual proof as well. It has to really manifest in your life as something that happens. So I would say, going back to your question of the universalism, I'm encouraging and I allow myself to, to, to show proof where I am in my own life.

Yeah.

Knowing that somebody else has to show proof in their way, in their life, my own proof does not constitute their proof, right? And that would be the same around geographical diversity. You know, my own experience was I'd learned things in Indonesia that I never learned in London. The relationship between London and Bandung in this case, or Telawa even, for me was very upside down. You know, in a very crude way, I thought coming from London that I would be something when I came to Indonesia. Even though I was Indonesian, I'd given London this kind of hierarchy. And I immediately turned it the other way around, you know, when I was there, like I was embarrassed, you know, that I'd come with that view because in Indonesia they have self-regard of a completely different kind. And I suddenly felt like I was a nobody, you know, like some sort of crude Westerner, you know. It was quite funny to see this kind of seesaw. I would say that probably exists everywhere in the world, that their sense of self that we should acknowledge, you know, the real dividing lines right now, stepping into a completely different thing, it's like the way we, for example, talk about China, you know, and the way Chinese may talk about themselves, you know, or the way we might talk about Russia or of course Israel, Gaza, it's like to really liberate yourself from the view that you know, you know what is possible in another country from another kind of people. You know, the idea that we as privileged people have more, you know, privilege is even our own idea, you know, of a hierarchy. We put ourselves, we call it privilege, but we're still putting ourselves on a hierarchy by doing that. Yeah. Is it privileged to be slaves on a hamster wheel to the growth economy? I don't know how privileged that really is. Yeah. You know, and yet we somehow embody that and we, and there's a history, of course, the whole history of colonialism. Makes us a priori guilty, you know, of something, others victims of us, you know, all of these hierarchies have to be questioned. Yeah.

No, no, it's true. Would you mind if I just went back a step? Just because one of the things I, I've never thought about before, but I think is really powerful, is what you were saying about the internet revolution and the emergence of that connectivity. And I think, could you talk just a little bit about that idea of, as we were saying about maybe this sense of agency, this kind of what, what it means to be agentic in this current moment has expanded with the capacities and with the possibilities. The internet obviously has been a huge part of that. And I think it felt to me like you were talking about something about an emergence of a, a self-awareness or a critical reflexivity that, that wasn't so in existence before because of the rise of like Facebook or, you know, seeing yourself in this.

I think it is absolutely core. So, you know, quite a lot when people talk about the internet, they think about access to information. Yeah. And then they think about your connection, you know, between friends and people and networks. So, you know, both of these are in a way quite practical things, whereas what I experienced myself, because I went through the internet revolution from the early stages, was a shift in responsibility and agency, meaning in the 1980s or '70s, I was still receiving my information from on high, you know, that it has filtered down to me, whether that was through newspapers or from authorities or from educational establishments, you know, I was on the receiving end in a way, and I would have to go looking for information in that way, but nobody was necessarily answering the questions I had. Whereas over the period, even in the early days of the internet, the idea that you were the instigator of the search for knowledge, that you could set the question and that you could start to look for answers on your own agenda, it was a real shift of agency. That's number one. The second thing is that for a vast amount of people, maybe the majority of people who never saw themselves in public life at all, they were only ever the, you know, employed by or included by, or, you know, they were on the receiving end of public life in a way, given a vote, you know, given permission, could start to see themselves. They could put themselves literally into the public sphere with an idea, with an opinion. But I would say the phenomenon of just being able to put a picture of yourself in public life meant you were there.

Yeah.

You know, and I remember there was a lot of criticism, you know, around the fashion for selfies and so on, how vain, how this—

vain narcissistic.

Yeah, it was a phenomenon.

I'm here.

Yeah.

You know, and for people of color, for women, for, you know, all sorts of excluded people to be able to create spaces in which you not only were being heard, but in some cases you could be dominant, right? You know, you could create whole groups, you know, like you could create a whole daily experience in which you heard mostly people like yourself for the first time in your life. And this shifted your relationship to the public space, and people began to think something is possible. Now, we may well say, and history may well show, that it upended things so radically that people began to get a very unreal, you know, we all, we all of us began to get a very unreal sense of possibility. And what wokeness is to some extent is the phenomenon of people linking up with each other and finding each other, you know, and being able to make huge statements in the virtual space that were never made before, feeling the power of that, but more the, I would call that soft power rather than hard power, meaning they could have an influence. You could start conversation, you could cause a lot of attraction, massive amounts of soft power for these causes that didn't necessarily quickly, you know, translate into laws changing or your own conditions changing. But your feeling of being alive was definitely— could definitely change quite rapidly through the mechanisms of the internet and virtual life.

Yeah.

So I think it's very difficult to understand for people who've always felt themselves quite present in society, but for people who felt invisible until the internet, I think it could cause radical shifts of power.

Yeah, I think it's such a fascinating insight or set of insights because it feels to me like a lot of what's happening now is that institutions are running to keep up with phenomenon. And so, you know, on one side you've got the market trying to co-opt that space of influencers and online communities and, and AI, you know, weaponizing all of that side. But then you've also got public institutions, public spaces, governance, education, all trying to again run to keep up with this idea that, well, young people are out there learning from each other, with each other, in these online spaces. They're feeling a sense of agency there. And then they go into these these public institutions, these schools where it's like an alternative reality, right? I mean, it's so, it's so divorced from their actual lived daily experience.

Yes.

And then we wonder why there's disengagement and, and apathy and, and meaninglessness about that experience.

Yeah.

Not to say there isn't, there isn't important value in that embodied experience of being together in a space, but the fact that it's run by the scripts of of the pre-internet generation. And so I think that's a lot of what's happening is how do we enable the institutions to radically evolve in order to, to meet that question and meet young people where they are, but still hold onto some of the value of the things that we, you know, the wisdom and the, the insights from the tradition that we have gathered over time.

Mm.

So again, it's that like dance between the now and the future and the, the past in that, in that interrelationship. Educationally and the attention economy. I mean, that's a whole, a whole nother thing, right? You know, in the fact that young people struggle in relation to sustained attention in, in non-digital spaces. And yeah, that's also a challenge to grapple with, but all, all in relation to kind of communications and internet revolution. So I think, I think it's a, it's a fascinating, important area.

Yeah, no, it is. I mean, and, and I'm, you know, I'm riffing when you are speaking, because there's a lot of aspects I think that, you know, we could, we could address. I mean, first of all, you know, this notion of waking up, you know, so young, young people waking up to themselves, you know, for digital natives, this isn't really divorced from, you know, them growing up. I mean, they're growing up and waking up to a reality that their parents are not really aware of on the whole. You know, you might say it was, it was always thus, right? You know, But the fate of youth, you know, moving from young to adolescent and then to adults in the past has been to, you know, colonize them actually. It's like put them into jobs, get them into jobs, you know, they'll soon learn that they have to make money to survive and, you know, they knuckle down to the system. That's not really it now, you know, because our world is failing on so many fronts. So there's an open space of inquiry that should be You know, I'm thinking immediately of the Hawaiian tradition of ho'oponopono, you know, where you get— you need the whole village really needs to be in a circle listening to each other's realities to be able to intuit some good way forward. But more and more, you know, the differences between pools of coherent agency need to be acknowledged so that some real partnership can happen between them. You know, if we don't really acknowledge, for example, that there's something different going on for young people than there is for their teachers or for their parents even, and there's no structural enabling of that, then it's not likely to happen because it'll come down to personalities and psychology. You know, one person winning over another, as you say, depending on where you are in the world. So I feel as if there needs to be some, a moment of acknowledgement, at least within the educational system, that we need to move into some sort of mutual learning space between younger people and older people, and that there should be a partnership, you know, between us. It's the same as in a family. At some point the parents say, okay, you know, show me who you are. I'm not going to tell you what to do anymore. Now you show me who you are and I'll do my best to support you becoming that person. That moment needs to arrive now, I think, within education because it's a unique time. What I sense is that there's a lot that an older generation has to offer a younger generation in terms of confidence and protection and, you know, creating space for them to meet themselves in, which isn't simply just a kind of formless survival level battling with the world at large. You know, there are structures that can support young people that they're— I think they're asking for. I've been in a conversation, I'm sure she won't mind me saying, uh, Hannah Close, who's an absolutely brilliant designer, young, and she's a young person, she's chosen to go and live in the Outer Hebrides and she's writing about islands and sharing her art. She's a fabulous artist, but she's been complaining recently about life online and how confusing and possibly self-destructive it is for her mental health and other things. And, you know, I'm finding that it's for me to say to her, yes, but on the other hand, without your online life and without the use of the internet, you know, you wouldn't be having the kind of impact that you can have with the work that you're doing. So now we're kind of moving into, okay, what can I help you with, you know, while you help me?. And I think these sorts of conversations that can happen, if you're lucky, it can happen between a parent and a child. You know, what support do you need to go out into the world? The parent has to be quite selfless in that regard. You know, in the interest of that young person becoming independent and standing up, taking their place. There's maybe not enough of that, you know, selflessness of the older generation, but there has to be also a certain humility from the younger person. Well, there's two things. It's a humility, but also it's a courage. You know, there's a courage needed to really accept this moment in time that they have something to do and that what they're suffering matters. You know, it can't be solved by someone else, that they will have to process this period of suffering and feeling the struggle of something and accept support and help from others. So moving into a sort of a shared You know, let me put on the Greta Thunberg hat, you know, so knowing with Greta, really feeling the power of her message, the intelligence with which she delivers it, she is also calling for response, you know, from the institutions around her. Please respond to what I'm saying. And that's setting up some sort of partnership between her anger and her insisting with a genuine response to what she's asking for. And when I say genuine, it can't be at the surface level, obviously, where politicians come up with a whole load of new green agendas and policies and promises that she knows they're not going to deliver. That's not what's required as a response. You know, the response has to be in situ grappling with what can be done at this time. Being informed by her demands and her or her generation feeding into the limitations of what is possible, but then coming, not leaving that space until something has emerged from it.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I definitely see all of that that you're talking about, those spaces of intergenerational dialogue and collaboration in my work. I mean, it is so enriching to, you know, all parties, right? The, the adults and the older people involved and the young people and what you're saying about the, the power of the online space, but also the, the inadequacy of it in, in terms of really nurturing, like nourishing people, you know, these young people in, like, for example, in the Festival of Hope work that we do, the young people, there's a kind of an, an aliveness, a connectedness that they feel from being involved in these embodied experiences, you know, and because it's in place, it's in situ, it's together, it's messy and nuanced and all of those things. But it is very real. And there is, as you said, there's a danger of the online that it's, yes, it's got so much power and connectedness and, but it's also surreal quite often, right? It, it has a, it lacks the embodied part, right? So I think, yeah, more, more of those kinds of spaces. And just if I can, I'm conscious of time, but I feel it would be an important miss if we didn't at least talk a bit about the the patriarchal part. Sure. I think, I think there's a question I have about, as we talk about the, the, the intergenerational collaboration and the young people sometimes showing up into these spaces like the Gretas and the Clover Hogans, and you know, quite often they're young women. And, and I've noticed that to a certain extent through my own work. And I have an interesting question there about where are the boys? Like, you know, and I think that also speaks to sometimes there's some of the language in, in your book, you talk about there's a bit of perhaps a feminization of the, of the politics of the new that needs to happen in really important ways. So there's something there about what is that and why is that an important feminization of, of some of the things. But then also the, the other side of that is how we don't lose our boys because then they're running off to Andrew Tate on the internet. You know, I have two sons and you know, that is my worst nightmare is is that they find a version of what it means to be masculine in the world from that toxic masculinity that comes from people like Andrew Tate.

Mm-hmm.

And so there's, there's interesting questions there for me about how do we hold that in a way that really challenges the patriarchy and really moves beyond it.

Mm-hmm.

Brings more feminization of the, the, the ways of being and relating, but at the same time speaks to young men.

It's such a big question and this, sometimes I think this has to be a book, you know. And interestingly enough, when I think about it as a book, I think more about the men than I do about the women, right? Because contrary to political feminization, I think there's another story to be told as well about that women historically in the home had more space and time than men did to build relationship, to be human, to see children historically, right? Whereas men historically were kicked out of the home to— or they went off their own accord.

Well, right, it's an inversion of the paradigm.

There's so many versions of the same thing, but in a way there's always on a continuum, you know, those with privilege used their power as men, those with lack of privilege, were forced to really in a way be the fodder of that decision. So yes, men maybe with the birth of agriculture began to cordon off pieces of land, call it their own, and provide for their family and start to make a hierarchy between those that were successful at doing that and those who weren't, but also giving women the role of staying at home home while they went out into the field. You know, things did occur. You know, history will tell a story of change, you know, and it's not necessarily that it will— won't keep changing. The story about what happened, where did the divides really occur, for what reason— a lesser told story about how women at home at least were able you know, had a different place of dominance, maybe, you know, to be able to set, you know, family structures, spend time with children. They had space and time that men perhaps didn't have once they were out in the field and in a very strict hierarchy of labor. The vast majority of men have had to behave in a certain way to be able to be capable of delivering that kind of labor. It might be to do with shutting down their emotions, becoming more like machines, you know, being able to deliver on demand. You know, this is sort of shutting down. You know, Iain McGilchrist talks about it very interestingly as the difference between a left brain and a right brain, that the way that the men behaved was to act upon the world, to change it, to dominate it. That's a very left-brained sort of way of looking at, you know, the reality around you. He doesn't say that women are more right-brained, and that isn't the case. What I would say is that women had the opportunity to be more whole-brained because they weren't forced into this narrowing down of their agency to, you know, act upon the world and to change it. They had more chance to be with the world and to develop it. So I would say historically there is a difference that needs to be taken into account. And then we're looking now at what is— what has been the outcome of these differences. You might say that still in the playgrounds you'll see differences between the way girls and boys behave as well as— and you can put it down to socializing and nurturing, but nevertheless, here it is. There is a difference between the way that they are. And young women as teenagers, you know, often quite overwhelming to young boys. Young girls are often quite overwhelming to young boys in the way the amount of information that they will bring into the space and overwhelm and talk and know a lot more and relate much more easily and create networks of influence in the playground that sometimes boys don't even know how to cope with. You know, they're much better playing in a structure with with, you know, a team structure or somewhere where they know their place and they acknowledge the best of them as being the best. And, you know, there's a hierarchy that comes naturally to them now. The, the tragedy of all of this separation or division of labor, in a way, it's been that, you know, too many men have suffered at the hands of that. And to me, we don't talk enough about how men are the victims of patriarchy. You know, the vast majority, for example, I think it's 87% of people in prison, you know, are men. And a lot of this is due to violent behavior. And a lot of the violent behavior is due to objecting to the world as it is, you know, not being able to process the world as it is, resisting the oppression of their personal lives all the time. My best friend actually works in an American prison where it's nearly all, you know, Black men incarcerated. And she uses the power of the arts to liberate them back into their emotional lives. You know, there's a history here of what happened to men. Another tragedy for me is— and but it's a fast-moving one— is how men were expected to, to be the fodder for war, for example, and the military-industrial complex, which is an economic model that perfectly reflects the way that aggression works in the world. And if it isn't processed well, then it can lead to war. And there's a whole, you know, industry around that. And we're, you know, there's a media industry around that. You know, we are expected to respond to other people's violence by becoming violent ourselves. And men are funneled into that space. How many times do we have to be reminded about the tragedy of men being sent to war to kill people they've never met and they've never understood. You know, they're just required to be machines. This is unspeakable atrocity and barbarity in my view, that men are the, you know, are the fodder for, you know, and then even more ordinary point about, you know, men and the mental health crisis that men have always, you know, in the history of recorded statistics, men have always been far more inclined to commit suicide than women. Men live in a world of, you know, not understanding why they are having to be the way they expect to be, and even they themselves expect to be something that they cannot really process, and they can't talk themselves out of it. Yeah, you know, and that, as women observing that, you know, there's some tragedy that culturally a lot of women have responded by wanting seeing the benefits of the male world, which is mostly money and position and status. There's a real sadness in that, you know. However, it's very understandable that they should want those benefits too, not really understanding the impact it has on everything else.

Yeah.

So when women compete with men for their material benefits and status, it's very often the case that are obliged to leave behind what they would historically have wanted to honor, you know, which is space and time to be with others, to be with each other, to be with their children, to be with their communities. All of that gets minimized and devalued in the process of wanting to equal men, you know, to be equal to them. So we're all suffering, you know, in this this idea of what our society could and should be. And the Adāan-ness of this is that the answers lie, you know, within our wider society, with the reality that even when women go out to compete in the men's world, they're still left with the task of holding their homes and their families together. They can't— they might as well do that, but then they're outsourcing the job. Not that the job goes away, Emotional labor is the biggest part of our labor, actually. And it's being done, it's being outsourced, you know, increasingly to people who do it for money or have to do it for money, which is not the same as doing it for love. We are a bit of a mess in that sense. I would say that's again, the internet, because our private selves are so insistent that we did turn the internet into a relational machine. We did turn the internet into something that teaches us about our psychology. You know, we did. It's a mess, you know, it's a bit crazy, it's like chaotic. But we did nevertheless not accept the internet as what it was originally designed for, which was a communication system within the military. That's what it was designed for, is, you know, a good communication system to hand out orders more effectively. We turned it into something that became emotionally live, that developed networks of relationship that, you know, we turned it into this crazy thing that it is now. And it's very alive and it's very dangerous. You know, it doesn't yet know how to relate to the public space that was designed as an economy that still has dominance over our lives. So it's a very live space. So to me, it's, you know, I moved into my house where we're living now 6 months ago. Until last weekend, we had this wilderness of a garden. Really beautiful wilderness of a garden. However, a lot of evidence that things were dying underneath, you know, that the grass, which was high and green at the top, was brown on the bottom. And that it's kind of a great metaphor for where we are now, because we need to prune back, you know, the stuff that is causing the dying at the bottom, which is not seeing the light of day anymore, which is a bit like we need more time now off we do need more time off the internet.

Yeah.

In community with each other, making real and giving things a chance to come back to life. So there needs to be more liveness in our lives, I think. And for us, this means more community work, but not leaving behind the internet at all. But, you know, rebalancing the technology of the self, you know, so we are also technologies. And one of the things that I say, and I say in my book, you know, often to men, women are the technology that you're looking for. You know, we are this technology. Please work better with us, like be with us in this space. And then I feel that the tragedies of patriarchy and masculinity will right themselves, you know, will begin to integrate better and, you know, through community.

That's just so fascinating, isn't it? The dynamics. Thank you so much. It really is an incredible pleasure to meet you. And for me too, Tim Logan.

Beautiful.

All right.

Thank you so much. Thanks so much, Tim Logan.

Have a good day.

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