Sepher Ehben: Reveries — יעקב פטורהצ’י— Lobster Think Tank

re-posted with permission from author

I have been thinking a lot about a particular disruption in our capacity to deliberate collectively that has been identified by intellectuals I find particularly compelling. (I previously wrote another reflection on this issue.)

In order to work together, we have to organize. There is no question about that. That is the definition of “together.” Working together, we can get more done. There is no question about that, either. Those are about the only things I don’t have questions about.

Group dynamics are incredibly complex. Many different disciplines study these dynamics. Many different disciplines are defined by these dynamics. Economics, political science, business, sociology, law, psychology, communication and others could be defined as studies of specific interactions between humans.

How we define these dynamics is essential to who we are. They actually define who we are. What has been most surprising to me, however, is the realization that these dynamics are not merely psychological. They are also biological and most importantly neurological.

How we think is affected by our biology. This shouldn’t be surprising, but I think it is. You think differently when you are hungry than when you are full. You think differently when you are tired than when you are well-rested.

That is not to say that I believe we live in a deterministic world. I don’t. I do decide what I buy when I go to Costco, regardless of whether I am hungry or satiated. But everyone who shops at Costco knows you should never go shopping at Costco on an empty stomach.

Our concepts of interpersonal dynamics do not reflect this reality. Our laws do not adequately account for the fact that 24 year old people do not have fully formed prefontal cortices. Our political models never discuss what time of day people vote or whether they do it on an empty stomach. Communications classes did not prepare me to address the fact that a female audience is likely to see color very differently than a male audience.

In fact, I grew up thinking the fact women wear colorful dresses and men wear drab clothes was purely a social construct. It isn’t! Men are far more likely to be colorblind than women. This is an important fact to know when you are creating a presentation and the answer cannot be to reduce everything to what accommodates the colorblind. Does anyone think that is fair for women to be limited by the lower physical capacity of men?

Puts a very different twist on the “physical capacity to be a soldier” when you are talking about airline pilots, doesn’t it? What would our police force look like if we disqualified anyone who is colorblind?

We have a knowledge explosion. We have greater mobility than ever before. We have greater inter-connectivity than ever before. Not only is the speed of change changing, but so is the rate at which the speed changes.

I simply don’t think the way we related with each other is capable of keeping up. A society that made laws by sending dozens of men to a meeting in a capital city was able to react to the changing needs of its population. We simply cannot make laws in the same manner. We can no longer organize ourselves in the same manner.

And organize ourselves, we must! We live in a world where the individual simply cannot be a jack-of-all-trades in any sense of the word. We can no longer depend on the computing capacity of a single brain. Our society can no longer be limited to the bandwidth of one person’s senses.

So, what do we do?

I think we have to build a new system from scratch. The United States famously uses its 50 different laboratories of democracies to try things out. But I think we need to see things tried out at a more fundamental level. I think we need people to come together and re-imagine interpersonal relationships at the level of the individual.

Jordan Peterson famously referred to the inevitability that our interpersonal relationships will end up bearing some relationship to how lobsters organize themselves in hierarchies. (He was not saying that they should, but only that they have that tendency!)

So how about the Lobsters (as his fans are sometimes jokingly referred to), actually run some experiments? Let’s get together and crowdsource some ideas on what a hierarchy of competence should look like.

Here is my attempt at brainstorming some of the characteristics I think maybe should describe such a relationship:

Competent, stable, redundant, able, agile, rewarding, capable, interactive, flexible, redundant, efficient, incremental, practical, merciful, pure, pragmatic, iterative, durable, simple, sane, humane, ethical, adaptive, open, social, discriminating, analytical, honest, fair, just, beautiful, graceful, elegant, perfect, evolving, actual, powerful, empirical, reflexive, helpful, utilitarian, hopeful, aspirational, inspirational, objective, honorable, empathetic, reasonable, collaborative, exclusive, inclusive, deliberate, pacific, aggressive…

It’s just a start, but it starts me thinking that all those years of mediocre grades I got in Physical Education were far more consequential than I ever considered.

Originally published at www.facebook.com.