{"id":3471562,"date":"2018-05-09T10:10:46","date_gmt":"2018-05-09T10:10:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.resilience.org\/?p=3471562"},"modified":"2018-05-09T10:10:47","modified_gmt":"2018-05-09T10:10:47","slug":"how-our-dreams-are-tamed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/stories\/2018-05-09\/how-our-dreams-are-tamed\/","title":{"rendered":"How our Dreams are Tamed"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I recently taught at\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.robhopkins.net\/2017\/04\/19\/henry-giroux-on-the-attack-on-the-public-imagination\/\">Schumacher College<\/a>, and spoke about the work I am doing about imagination.\u00a0 Afterwards, a few students came up to me and said \u201cyou must speak to\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/edst.educ.ubc.ca\/facultystaff\/vanessa-andreotti\/\">Vanessa Andreotti<\/a>\u201c!\u00a0 \u00a0She had, earlier that week, Skyped into the class, and presented her thinking about imagination, among other things.\u00a0 So I tracked her down and got in touch, and we had the following fascinating conversation.\u00a0 Vanessa is a Professor, and is the Canada Research Chair in Race, Inequalities and Global Change at the University of British Columbia.<\/p>\n<p>She has a particular interest in education for, and about, international development, in global citizenship education, in global justice and in the ethics of internationalization.\u00a0\u00a0I started out by asking her why she thought it was that those students felt I should speak to her, and what her sense is on the current state of health of our imagination in 2018:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/w.soundcloud.com\/player\/?url=https%3A\/\/api.soundcloud.com\/tracks\/441055089&amp;color=%23ef16ea&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true&amp;visual=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"600\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>I think they wanted me to talk to you because probably the analysis that they were presented and the frameworks they were presented were a bit different from what they had been presented before.\u00a0 I work with collectives, that includes scholars, students, but also activists, artists, people in health, all looking at specific questions that relate to the question you\u2019re asking, and in relation to the imagination.<\/p>\n<p>In a nutshell, what we\u2019re looking at is the fact that our senses of self-worth, belonging, enjoyment, purpose, hope and security, are all tied up in a specific structure of being.\u00a0 Some would say it\u2019s a neural-biological structure.\u00a0 But it\u2019s definitely not just a structure of thinking, or imagination as we tend to think about it in terms of imaging a future.\u00a0 It\u2019s deeper than that.<\/p>\n<p>This architecture imposes restrictions on the imagination, and on how we relate, how we act.\u00a0 \u00a0It\u2019s like it conditions certain muscles and not others in our being, and unless we have a form of autogenesis or neurogenesis, we won\u2019t be able to break this.\u00a0 But at the same time in Brazil we have this saying that, \u201cIn a situation of a flood, it\u2019s only when the water reaches your bum, that you can actually swim.\u201d\u00a0 Right?\u00a0 Before that, if the water is at your ankle, or if it the water is at your knee, you can\u2019t swim.\u00a0 You can only walk.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-large wp-image-864\" src=\"https:\/\/i1.wp.com\/www.robhopkins.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/download-2.jpg?resize=1100%2C733&amp;ssl=1\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1100px) 100vw, 1100px\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i1.wp.com\/www.robhopkins.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/download-2.jpg?resize=1100%2C733&amp;ssl=1 1100w, https:\/\/i1.wp.com\/www.robhopkins.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/download-2.jpg?resize=300%2C200&amp;ssl=1 300w, https:\/\/i1.wp.com\/www.robhopkins.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/download-2.jpg?resize=768%2C512&amp;ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i1.wp.com\/www.robhopkins.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/download-2.jpg?w=1400&amp;ssl=1 1400w\" alt=\"\" width=\"1100\" height=\"733\" \/><\/p>\n<p>We have been talking a lot in the collective about timing, and what it takes for us to lose the satisfaction with the things that have given us pleasure, and comfort, so far.\u00a0 Not only in material terms but also in the sense of self-worth, belonging, enjoyment.\u00a0 It\u2019s a sense of entitlements as well, so that we would start to disinvest in the structure that creates this thing.\u00a0 In many ways it can be compared to an addiction process where we get dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin in certain ways.\u00a0 And of course there are infinite possibilities of different configurations, but this is the easiest one, the most available one.\u00a0 And then what would it take for us to choose to be in withdrawal, and to try different things, is part of what we are asking through the questions of the collective.<\/p>\n<p><strong>I interviewed Henry Giroux a while ago.\u00a0 He talks about the \u2018Trump dis-imagination machine\u2019 which I thought was fascinating, the idea of an intentional process designed to pacify and sedate our imaginations.\u00a0 I notice that on your website you ask \u201cHow have our dreams been tamed?\u201d\u00a0 I wondered what your reflections were on how our dreams and imaginations have been tamed?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>In the collective we use the analogy of a house to talk about the basic structure of modernity.\u00a0Imagine a house with a foundation, a baseline, the floor representing our separation from being entangled with the earth, so we call it separability, our sense of separation.\u00a0 Then there are two carrying walls.\u00a0 One carrying wall represents Western humanism and this idea of a singular rationality, and the sense that being can be reduced to knowing.\u00a0 \u2018I think therefore I am\u2019, and all of that.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-large wp-image-868\" src=\"https:\/\/i2.wp.com\/www.robhopkins.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/download-4.jpg?resize=1100%2C773&amp;ssl=1\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1100px) 100vw, 1100px\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i2.wp.com\/www.robhopkins.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/download-4.jpg?resize=1100%2C773&amp;ssl=1 1100w, https:\/\/i2.wp.com\/www.robhopkins.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/download-4.jpg?resize=300%2C211&amp;ssl=1 300w, https:\/\/i2.wp.com\/www.robhopkins.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/download-4.jpg?resize=768%2C539&amp;ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i2.wp.com\/www.robhopkins.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/download-4.jpg?w=1300&amp;ssl=1 1300w\" alt=\"\" width=\"1100\" height=\"773\" \/><\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s another carrying wall of the nation state that also conditions how we think about security and belonging.\u00a0 Then there\u2019s a roof of shareholder capitalism.\u00a0 A financial capitalism that has a damaged structure in itself and that is leaking in the house and bringing water damage to the walls and to the foundation of the house.<\/p>\n<p>In terms of our dreams being tamed, when we think about global change, we generally either think about fixing the house, or building another house.\u00a0 So, using the same tools but it\u2019s very difficult to think about not living in a house, or other kinds of houses \u2013 like a sweat lodge is in the shape of a womb, and is a house too, but a temporary house.\u00a0 It just provides temporary shelter.<\/p>\n<p>In that sense our dreams have been tamed by the house itself.\u00a0 We can only imagine change as long as we keep the same securities, as long as we keep the same sense of entitlement.\u00a0 We can\u2019t imagine, for example, purpose.\u00a0 The purpose of life: that house has created the idea that it\u2019s meaning.\u00a0 We have to find meaning in life.\u00a0 But, is it?\u00a0 What life is about? Is life about finding meaning?\u00a0 Where does this idea come from?\u00a0 There\u2019s a genealogy to that idea.<\/p>\n<p>But it\u2019s not just a matter of thinking differently.\u00a0 Because we can think differently.\u00a0 There are two things.\u00a0 The two problems are that when we see that house is damaged and that it will run its course, and we\u2019ll need something else, the first response is usually, \u201cLet\u2019s fix it. \u00a0Let\u2019s extend it.\u00a0 Let\u2019s find a way to keep it.\u201d\u00a0 The second is, \u201cLet\u2019s replace it.\u201d\u00a0 And the third is, \u201cIt doesn\u2019t work.\u00a0 None of this works.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The sense that we can imagine something different is that we have to reach that stage where we have lost the satisfaction with what the house \u2013 the pleasures, specifically, or the enjoyments and the entitlements \u2013 has afforded us.\u00a0 Trump is helping in that sense.\u00a0 It is helping us get disillusioned with the house by making it very explicit there\u2019s attempt to fix it, or bring a different, more stable or secure, order in his mind to it.<\/p>\n<p>But with people for example who have worked with Giroux\u2019s ideas, which are related to critical pedagogy, and the historicity of that idea \u2013 the location of that idea being in a period of industrial capitalism, not financial capitalism, that\u2019s how it originated in civil rights, struggles for human rights, and in a period of Cold War.\u00a0 The things that were made possible in that period are not possible right now.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m working with people who have worked with these ideas for 30 years, for example now in the US, coming to me and saying, \u201cI\u2019m completely disillusioned\u201d and then feeling that disillusionment as a problem.\u00a0 I generally say disillusionment is not a problem, it\u2019s a good thing.\u00a0 It\u2019s disillusion and you don\u2019t want to be believing in an illusion.\u00a0 How do we see this as a productive moment?<\/p>\n<p>To actually examine the history of this, and the fact that, for example, in the US now we see a lot of people going back to thinking about civil rights movements as a place of inspiration.\u00a0 But then I generally say, \u201cOkay, when your government was doing this, and if you look at critical race theory, for example, they have analysis of the legal process of school desegregation, for example, that showed that the justification for school desegregation was actually the Cold War.\u201d\u00a0 The US could not afford to have as part of its image this idea of segregated schools when it was selling an image of democracy and liberty in other countries.<\/p>\n<p>At the same time, it was intervening in Latin America with coups all around, with killings and torture, at the same time that at home it was creating this other narrative.\u00a0 So critical race theory talks about the fact that the state has been created to protect capital, to protect property.\u00a0 And there have only been concessions when the interests of capital converged with the interests of the citizenry, and in that case that was a case in point.<\/p>\n<p>Right now, going back to that movement is not going to have the same effect.\u00a0 It is a generational thing as well, in terms of if what has worked before is not going to work in the current state of things, then what?\u00a0 Right?\u00a0 If people feel that the \u201cThen what?\u201d question is a very threatening question, they\u2019re going to go one way.\u00a0 But if you think that the \u201cThen what?\u201d is an opportunity for us to approach this very differently, then it\u2019s something else.<\/p>\n<p>But in that sense we would have needed an education that prepares us to deal with complexity, with paradoxes, with ambiguity, with uncertainty and with unpredictability, so that we can walk together in this foggy road, together.\u00a0 And see failure, and disillusionment, as actually productive things rather than being threatened by this.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-865\" src=\"https:\/\/i1.wp.com\/www.robhopkins.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/download-1.jpg?resize=620%2C413&amp;ssl=1\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 620px) 100vw, 620px\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i1.wp.com\/www.robhopkins.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/download-1.jpg?w=474&amp;ssl=1 474w, https:\/\/i1.wp.com\/www.robhopkins.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/download-1.jpg?resize=300%2C200&amp;ssl=1 300w\" alt=\"\" width=\"620\" height=\"413\" \/><\/p>\n<p><strong>When Margaret Thatcher said, \u201cThere is no alternative\u201d, they were possibly the four most harmful words anybody could bring to these discussions, because the process of knowing there is an alternative, and asking what it might be, is what unlocks all the creativity that we need right now?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>It unlocks a curiosity.\u00a0 In order to unlock the creativity, we need that neurogenesis thing, which is not just about thinking, it\u2019s sensorial.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been working a lot with indigenous people.\u00a0 I have a lot of reverence for the gifts and teachings, but without idealisation, I don\u2019t think there is a model there.\u00a0 Or, there are examples, and they\u2019re examples of practices that we have lost.\u00a0 Especially practices that remind us of how entangled we are with everything and that dissociate us from the obsession with identity.\u00a0 So I\u2019m going in that direction with them.<\/p>\n<p>But one of the things that I\u2019ve heard a lot in Brazil, for example, is that we learn first from the gut.\u00a0 The gut changes the heart, and the thinking follows.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been trying to follow that insight and understand it in terms of pedagogical implications.\u00a0 How do we open up a formal education that unlocks creativity outside of this box?\u00a0 To be very honest with you, it has been, in the experiments we\u2019ve been doing with the collective, embodied experiences that make you get in contact with something that is in excess of knowing.\u00a0 Something that is unknowable in the articulated sense, but that you can touch, that then helps you change your thinking, rather than the other way around.<\/p>\n<p>Thinking will change that.\u00a0 Thinking helps get to the point where you understand your choices and the implications you have.\u00a0 But beyond that, it\u2019s the body that has to do something.\u00a0 At the same time, I\u2019m very wary of how the New Age movement has gone, which tries to open these things up, but for sometimes reasons that I\u2019ve still located in the house.\u00a0 It may open up one of the carrying walls, but still keeps the other walls, or starts talking about it in a different way, but doesn\u2019t necessarily sensorially embody it.<\/p>\n<p>Then there are lots of people selling models, and certainties.\u00a0 Especially for a way of being that sees certainty as the pre-condition for security.\u00a0 You have a lot of people selling things that are meant to work but at the same time the promises are very overstated, and the problems are really deep, and we don\u2019t get the time\u2026\u00a0 at some point it becomes a distraction to want these models, and then not have the time to actually see how we are embedded in something very water damaged.\u00a0 And will go.\u00a0 Will have to go.\u00a0 Because then these promises help us reinvest in the same structures.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Let\u2019s go back a bit and talk about having those really good \u201cWhat if?\u201d questions.\u00a0 \u201cWhat if, actually, it worked like this, or we did it like this?\u201d\u00a0 One of the things I love seeing in some of the Transition groups, for example, that I go to visit, is when they have a really powerful \u201cWhat if\u201d question and they facilitate that process of inviting people into it, and it leads to all kinds of amazing things.\u00a0 What for you are the ingredients of a good \u201cWhat if\u201d or a \u201cThen what\u201d question?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>What if it\u2019s something we can\u2019t imagine right now but we can tap with other senses?\u00a0 Right?\u00a0 So do we need the houses?\u00a0 What do the houses prevent us from being?\u00a0 I believe we need shelter, but it\u2019s temporary shelter.\u00a0 We don\u2019t need shelter all the time.\u00a0 We need shelter when it\u2019s really cold, or when it\u2019s really hot, or when basically the weather is affecting our possibility for survival.<\/p>\n<p>What does it mean also not to have that kind of shelter?\u00a0 What does it mean to be part of this interwoven entanglement with everything without having our defences up all the time?\u00a0 What if we are much more than we have become, in terms of possibilities for being?\u00a0 For structures of being?\u00a0 What if we can relate in ways that we haven\u2019t been able to articulate within the house?\u00a0 These are the kinds of questions.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve been working with young people in a family here and outside that have been asking, \u201cWhat am I doing here?\u201d \u00a0And saying, \u201cIf the house is falling apart and I\u2019m not going to have these enjoyments anymore, then what?\u201d\u00a0 Some of them are asking this.\u00a0 Others are saying, \u201cWe\u2019re destroying everything.\u00a0 I don\u2019t want to stay to see it happening.\u201d\u00a0 Levels of depression, anxiety and self-harm have been on the rise, and the kinds of things that I see are useful I think in this process is number one, metaphorically, or in terms of narratives, pluralising the narratives.\u00a0 For young people, having more narratives.<\/p>\n<p>One of the conversations I was asking, \u201cWhat is this pain?\u00a0 Where do you think this pain comes from that you feel?\u201d\u00a0 The response was that it was like a phantom limb pain.\u00a0 I thought that was very insightful, and then asked, \u201cSo why do you feel that it\u2019s phantom limb?\u201d\u00a0 Then the explanation was because people tell us we shouldn\u2019t have it, and it\u2019s there.\u00a0 And then the teachers, the psychologist and the psychiatrists say, \u201cYou should just be functional in the house.\u00a0 You should just numb yourself to this pain and be functional in the house.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Then they said, \u201cThen you feel guilty for feeling it when you shouldn\u2019t be feeling it too.\u201d\u00a0 If you go to the books about self-harm and suicide, you will see that the explanation is there\u2019s a lack of belonging, and people are overwhelmed with information, which is absolutely true in our times. \u00a0There\u2019s also lack of self-worth.\u00a0 So I tested it a little bit and I said, \u201cIs this what you feel you\u2019re feeling?\u00a0 Lack of belonging or self-worth?\u201d\u00a0 The response surprised me.<\/p>\n<p>For some of them, it was like, \u201cNo.\u00a0 I actually feel quite connected with everything.\u00a0 It\u2019s just that everything is being destroyed.\u00a0 I don\u2019t want to stay.\u201d Right?\u00a0 Some indigenous cosmologists would say that if we are connected with everything, people are dying in Syria, you are feeling it here.\u00a0 Right?\u00a0 And the problem in the fact that we don\u2019t have the words to talk about it, or to understand the implications of this, is actually what\u2019s hurting.<\/p>\n<p>Then I tested this again with young people.\u00a0 I said, \u201cDoes it help to name it as a pain that comes from a connection that isn\u2019t acknowledged?\u201d\u00a0 They said it helps but it doesn\u2019t help us deal with the pain.\u00a0 I work with a few indigenous communities and I said, \u201cHow would you respond to that?\u201d\u00a0 They said, this is another problem of the house, that it numbs our senses.\u00a0 We don\u2019t have five senses, we have 99.\u00a0 That\u2019s the idea that we can sense and feel much more than we are allowed to within the house.<\/p>\n<p>That the same way, I was told, the same way that we can scale our hearing to hear what is near and what is far, we can scale the sense of the heart in how you sense.\u00a0 They said that it was very important when you were feeling the collective pain, to scale the heart to the collective level, because an individual heart cannot deal with the collective pain.\u00a0 We need to do it collectively.<\/p>\n<p>It makes a lot of sense.\u00a0 This sense of being overwhelmed, not only with information, but also with pain, is to do with our incapacity within the house to scale up the heart, and see ourselves as part of everything.\u00a0 And not just in one temporality, but in a much longer temporality that spans seven generations, seven generations to come.\u00a0 If we can\u2019t do that, if it\u2019s just this life, this individual body, that needs to be functional within capitalist modern societies, it becomes a very difficult thing for young people to do when the house is falling apart.\u00a0 And when they know.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Going back to Henry Giroux\u2019s thing about the dis-imagination machine, when Ben Carson was saying, \u201cWell all the slaves, they came here in pursuit of the Great American dream\u2026 \u00a0They came here on holiday hoping they might find a good job or they were here\u2026\u201d \u00a0When our history is distorted and devalued and abused in that way, how does that affect our ability to imagine something other than the house?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s a very, very, very good question.\u00a0 Again in the collective we talk about this process of hospicing a world that is dying, and assisting with the birth of something new, undefined, and potentially but not necessarily, wiser.\u00a0 The first thing is we need to sit with the mistakes \u2013 the repeated mistakes that we have made, and continuously make \u2013 in order to make different mistakes in the future.<\/p>\n<p>We also need to break this idea that it\u2019s going to be set right.\u00a0 But if we don\u2019t have the stamina to sit with our denials, our foreclosures, and the difficult things, without falling apart internally or without having our relationships fall apart, we can\u2019t even start the process, because we will keep on defending and protecting our own fragility in doing this.\u00a0 And that\u2019s the fragility that the house creates.<\/p>\n<p>In this process of hospicing and midwifing you need to imagine a Venn diagram.\u00a0 That there\u2019s hospicing, then there\u2019s midwifing touching it, and there\u2019s an interface action.\u00a0 In that interface there is a storm, and there\u2019s an eye of the storm right there.\u00a0 So education, or pedagogy, needs to be at that eye.\u00a0 If you walk too fast you get caught in the storm.\u00a0 If you walk too slow you get caught in the storm.\u00a0 So you need to be with the storm in many ways.<\/p>\n<p>Then we talk about two things that you need to pay attention in relation to hospicing, and two things in relation to helping with the birth.\u00a0 So in relation to hospicing, there is intellectual accountability, being able to sit with these things but then not being caught in the kind of vortex that that itself creates.\u00a0 So you need something else.\u00a0 You need existential surrender.\u00a0 Outside the fragility that we have been conditioned in.\u00a0 So intellectual accountability, yes, but you also need to find other ways of being.<\/p>\n<p>Because in this idea of being that is reduced to knowing, if you go deep into all these violences of the past, you get caught in a vortex of guilt and blame and worthlessness and lack of belonging.\u00a0 That is not useful.\u00a0 What is useful would be to find another way of being that can help you sit with that.\u00a0 That\u2019s existential surrender to what is an excess of knowing is necessary, in here.<\/p>\n<p>Then on the other side, for the birth, you need two things that are similar but different.\u00a0 Instead of intellectual accountability, you need existential accountability, but not as an intellectual choice.\u00a0 It\u2019s already something that neurologically we were prone to doing if we can find that key.\u00a0 Then you need also intellectual surrender \u2013 the best way I think we can talk about it is allowing the land to dream through you, so allowing the imagination to open to the collective entanglement with things, and not thinking it\u2019s an individual task.\u00a0 It is something that comes through you.\u00a0 Indigenous people would say it\u2019s through your ancestors, but the ancestors are not only human, and they are not only those who have come before.\u00a0 They are also those yet to come, because it\u2019s a cyclical thing.<\/p>\n<p>How do we step back from this obsession and addiction to what the house has conditioned?\u00a0 To allow ourselves to see our being not just confined to this body?\u00a0 To see ourselves, the extinction of our being in everything, and that thing being able to dream with us, when you think about us, it\u2019s a one plus one thing.\u00a0 It\u2019s me and you.<\/p>\n<p>But what I\u2019m talking about, it\u2019s me in you.\u00a0 Me in this bigger metabolism where I\u2019m just part of something that is born and dies every day, and that is in this continuous cycle of regeneration.\u00a0 But that right now is probably stuck somewhere, and sick, trying to heal itself. \u00a0How do I allow the other kind of cells, like new red blood cells coming from the marrow, and the white blood cells coming to fight the infection, how do I allow that to pass through me, without being afraid of dying, or afraid of pain in this process?<\/p>\n<p>Because it is painful already.\u00a0 It\u2019s just that the effort that it takes for us to placate the pain is preventing us from doing other things that we can do with pain, in terms of opening up other possibilities.<\/p>\n<p><strong>If you had been elected as the Prime Minister of Canada, or the President of Brazil, or wherever, and you had a run on a platform of \u2018Make Canada Imaginative again\u2019 \u2013 deciding that there was an intense, acute need at this time to foster imagination through education, in public life, at the community level, \u00a0that really the only way forward was going to be to have a national emergency programme of imagination building and valuing and enhancing \u2013 I wonder what sort of things you might do in your first 100 days in office?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I think the government of Canada is actually promoting that agenda, but for the agenda of innovation, and the idea of regenerating our economy, but without questioning the premises of exchange value, and the continuity of financial capitalism.\u00a0 I would probably be working towards a different agenda of opening ourselves up to other possibilities of being.\u00a0 What would I do at the national level?<\/p>\n<p>I would probably, especially in Canada, talk to some of the others I know in the indigenous communities and say, \u201cThat\u2019s our opportunity to invite people into these other practices.\u201d In an ironic way they have it here.\u00a0 Right?\u00a0 They have people who still have access to other practices and they have other communities here with access to practices like mindfulness, which are often instrumentalised to some functionality in the capitalist economy too.<\/p>\n<p>But I would get those elders together, and say, \u201cThis is our opportunity.\u00a0 If we have an agenda of neurogenesis and autogenesis, that\u2019s the time when we can invite those who are ready to jump into this unknown, to get as many people as possible to see that there are other possibilities.\u201d\u00a0 It\u2019s just that we can\u2019t put these possibilities in the box straight away.\u00a0 We have to live them.\u00a0 Or start living them before we can start articulating.\u00a0 I would work with the wealth that is already here.<\/p>\n<p><strong>You talked about education.\u00a0 I\u2019ve spoken to some people who are working very hard to try and bring more imaginative practice into mainstream school, and some other people who say mainstream school is basically a dis-imagination machine and we need to \u2018un-school\u2019 and to find alternatives.\u00a0 Use the community as the way that we educate. \u00a0I wonder for you what would our education system look like if it were most designed to produce a generation of young people who were able to understand the house they\u2019re in, and play a full active role in designing whatever comes next.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s interesting.\u00a0 I work with both.\u00a0 I work with those who want to transform the current educational system, not because they believe in the agenda \u2013 the national agenda of the system \u2013 but because they know it\u2019s probably the only place where we have young people forced to be in a place for some time, and that\u2019s a \u2013 not a captive audience because they are somewhere else also with their minds \u2013 but yeah.<\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s something about that idea that it\u2019s still a commons that we need to fight for, despite other agendas being imposed on it.\u00a0 I also work with those who have given up the idea of formal schooling and are into something else.\u00a0 For formal schooling I would say our children have the right to know what\u2019s going on. \u00a0And they have the right also to know about communities that have been swimming, right? \u00a0So if the waters are rising, we need to learn to swim.\u00a0 I don\u2019t believe it\u2019s about models.\u00a0 It\u2019s not going there and seeing how that community can provide a model, but examples.\u00a0 That includes paradoxes, failures and complexities of every example.<\/p>\n<p>So one of the projects that I have \u2013 a research project \u2013 is to create case studies of communities and organisations and social initiatives that are doing three of the four criteria that we have that are related to the house.\u00a0 So communities that are imagining \u2013 not imagining, they are setting their horizons of hope, beyond capitalism and socialism.\u00a0 They are setting their horizons of hope beyond this idea of singular universal rationality.\u00a0 The third thing is anthropocentric separability \u2013 the idea that we\u2019re separate from each other.\u00a0 The fourth thing is nation states and the idea of \u2013 there\u2019s something about relationships too.\u00a0 There\u2019s this idea of promoting relationships beyond knowledge, identity and understanding.\u00a0 I don\u2019t remember where exactly it goes.<\/p>\n<p>So the four things are basically the nation state, separability, single rationality and capitalism and socialism.\u00a0 So we\u2019re working with communities in Latin America \u2013 mainly in Latin America \u2013 that have identified themselves as doing at least three of these.\u00a0 Creating stories that can be told to young people to say that, \u201cLook, this has happened in other places, before.\u00a0 Actually to subsidise the house you are in, right now, that house has a cost that was not paid by the people in the house necessarily.\u00a0 The house sucked resources from the planet and deposited its waste in the planet as well, and we are reaching the limits of that in the communities that have not been in the house, or have been associated with the house but with a foot outside fighting these effects.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Young people have the right to know about the struggles and the fights of other communities.\u00a0 They also have the right to know that there are other practices of being that can provide them with the things that they need right now to be able to survive this.\u00a0 So maybe even talking metaphorically about neuroscience, in terms of other possibilities of generating dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin, so that we can be with each other in a very different way.<\/p>\n<p>With those who are outside already who are promoting alternatives, my engagement has been to figure out an alternative way of engaging with alternatives that is not just a dialectical negation of what you don\u2019t like in the old system.\u00a0 So generally the process gets caught in this\u2026 \u00a0There is an analysis, \u201cI don\u2019t like this in the old, I\u2019m going to try and do something that is opposite to that.\u201d\u00a0 That creates a problem, because it\u2019s like you saying, or me saying, \u201cI\u2019m not going to be like my Mum.\u201d\u00a0 And in the end you are still caught in that relationship between what you are rejecting and what you are negating, and what you want to become.<\/p>\n<p>There is another way of stepping out of it and saying, \u201cThis is actually a dynamic, and what is actually is possible doesn\u2019t depend on this.\u201d\u00a0 Right?\u00a0 Yes, we need to sit with that, and we need to sit, but we also need to sit with our own response to it because the response is still caught in the same structure of being.\u00a0 It is a more difficult process with those who are engaged in alternatives, because there is also a very strong serotonin response about self-worth, that if I get this right, then I\u2019m going to change the world.\u00a0 Then failure becomes a real problem, and it\u2019s a personal validation problem.<\/p>\n<p>Dealing with critique and dealing with paradoxes, it\u2019s more difficult than even in the formal system.\u00a0 The idea that education should be about complexities, paradoxes, ambiguity, is actually easier to swallow if you\u2019re still in the system than if you\u2019re trying to create something different.\u00a0 For that I think I witnessed a teaching from Deborah Friesen once in the Occupy Movement in Ireland. \u00a0I was waiting to speak at a square.\u00a0 They had asked me to talk about global relations and distribution, and she was speaking before me.<\/p>\n<p>What she was saying is that once the system peaks, and you want to walk out, the hope you have for an alternative is still bound by the hot ashes of the old.\u00a0 You\u2019re still looking for the same sense of security and through the same sense of entitlement that the old has afforded.\u00a0 But she said that this is not what is going to help.\u00a0 You need to know that whatever alternative you create from the hot ashes, it\u2019s still going to reproduce the old and fail.\u00a0 You need to use this failure, that has the seeds of what those who come after you may take, in the fertile soil when these ashes have cooled down.\u00a0 I thought that was really what is necessary.<\/p>\n<p>How do we go for the seeds \u2013 and have the sense that there are hot ashes that need to cool down, to become composted, and then become the fertile soil for those who come after us \u2013 rather than look for our own sense of worth and belonging and value in the thing that we\u2019re doing?\u00a0 That kind of thinking I found, or that kind of sensing actually \u2013 it\u2019s not a thinking, it comes from the gut, it\u2019s a visceral thing about us being, that those who come after us are still us.\u00a0 And my body has a different temporality that spans lifetimes and I take account of that as I\u2019m doing something, and I have more patience to learn from my mistakes.\u00a0 So that others can make different ones, not the same ones.<\/p>\n<p>I can articulate that carefully and pay attention to the pathway in a very different way so that it\u2019s not for me, it\u2019s for others.\u00a0 My own process of self-validation doesn\u2019t become the priority here, which is something interesting at the house.\u00a0 Part of the problem is that separability, this idea of separation of humans from everything else, or us from each other, has created the idea that we don\u2019t have intrinsic value, and therefore we have to prove why we\u2019re alive.\u00a0 So the sense of worthlessness, and the fear of worthlessness, of pointlessness, of meaninglessness, tends to drive a lot of our efforts.\u00a0 But if we remove that fear, That\u2019s my \u2018if\u2019 question:\u00a0 if we manage to remove that fear, of pointlessness, worthlessness, and meaninglessness, what would be possible for us to do?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So the sense of worthlessness, and the fear of worthlessness, of pointlessness, of meaninglessness, tends to drive a lot of our efforts.\u00a0 But if we remove that fear, That\u2019s my \u2018if\u2019 question:\u00a0 if we manage to remove that fear, of pointlessness, worthlessness, and meaninglessness, what would be possible for us to do?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128238,"featured_media":3471564,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[213522,213526,79720],"tags":[163844,99781],"class_list":["post-3471562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-inspiration","category-act-inspiration-featured","category-society","tag-buildingresilientsocieties","tag-imagination"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3471562","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128238"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3471562"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3471562\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3471564"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3471562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3471562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3471562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}