• for: doppleganger, conflict resolution, deep humanity, common denominators, CHD, Douglas Rushkoff, Naomi Klein, Into the Mirror World, conspiracy theory, conspiracy theories, conspiracy culture, nonduality, self-other, human interbeing, polycrisis, othering, storytelling, myth-making, social media amplifier -summary
  • This conversation was insightful on so many dimensions salient to the polycrisis humanity is moving through.
  • It makes me think of the old cliches:
    • "The more things change, the more they remain the same"
    • "What's old is new" ' "History repeats"
  • the conversation explores Naomi's latest book (as of this podcast), Into the Mirror World, in which Naomi adopts a different style of writing to explicate, articulate and give voice to
    • implicit and tacit discomforting ideas and feelings she experienced during covid and earlier, and
    • became a focal point through a personal comparative analysis with another female author and thought leader, Naomi Wolf,
      • a feminist writer who ended up being rejected by mainstream media and turned to right wing media.
  • The conversation explores the process of:
    • othering,
    • coopting and
    • abandoning
  • of ideas important for personal and social wellbeing.
  • and speaks to the need to identify what is going on and to reclaim those ideas for the sake of humanity
  • In this context, the doppleganger is the people who are mirror-like imiages of ourselves, but on the other side of polarized issues.
  • Charismatic leaders who are bad actors often are good at identifying the suffering of the masses, and coopt the ideas of good actors to serve their own ends of self-enrichment.
  • There are real world conspiracies that have caused significant societal harm, and still do,
  • however, when there ithere are phenomena which we have no direct sense experience of, the mixture of
    • a sense of helplessness,
    • anger emerging from injustice
  • a charismatic leader proposing a concrete, possible but explanatory theory
  • is a powerful story whose mythology can be reified by many people believing it
  • Another cliche springs to mind
    • A lie told a hundred times becomes a truth
    • hence the amplifying role of social media
  • When we think about where this phenomena manifests, we find it everywhere:

• for: self, constructing reality, constructed self, constructed reality, constructing the sense of self, self and other, nonduality, duality, insecurable, comment, question

• paraphrase

  • sense of self is a construct
  • a psychological and social construct
  • it's not something that infants are born with
    • it's actually something that develops as we grow up
  • our caregivers look into our eyes
    • give us a name that we learned to identify with and
    • also basically we learn to see ourselves as they see us
      • we internalize that which is why we are so preoccupied with what other people think about
    • we learned to use language in certain ways
      • mine
      • you
      • yours
      • his
      • hers and so forth
    • that's all very essential to it
  • so we could say that the sense of self is being a construct
  • it's composed of mostly habitual ways of
    • thinking
    • feeling
    • acting
    • reacting
    • remembering
    • planning and
    • tending
  • it's the way that these mostly habitual processes work together re-enforce each other
  • but does that give us insight into what the fundamental problem is?
• I think it does and here's what it is as I understand it
  • because the sense of self is a construct
    • because it doesn't refer it
    • doesn't depend on it
    • doesn't point back to a real self that has any self-reality or or self-identity

• this sense of self by virtue of its lack of essence is inherently uncomfortable

  • we can say it's basically inherently insecure
  • in fact it's not only insecure but it's insecurable

• comment

• question
  • I agree with David's analysis but also have a question for him:
    • what about the biological, evolutionary definition of the self of a living organism. Is there a contradiction here?
    • reference
      • Major Evolutionary Transitions occur when a group of individuated living organisms achieve greater fitness by mutualism and begin to reproduce together as a new unit
        • How do we harmonize the claim of a psychologically constructed self with this evolutionary formation of new biological SELF units through MET?

• for: further inquiry, unpack, self-other entanglement, dual, nondual
• paraphrase
  • Our real challenge, perhaps, is in relearning what the “collective interest” actually means,
  • and why it is so important,
  • and how we got to this perverse situation
    • where we have such monstrous distrust of each other,
    • and of collectives in general,
    • that we have assumed that, somehow, 7.8B people acting in their
      • isolated
      • individual,
      • personal, and often
      • trauma-influenced
    • self-interest,
    • will somehow be synonymous with an optimal collective interest.
• comment
  • it points once again to a deeper understanding of the relationship between
    • self and
    • other
    • and their entanglement

• "gestation rewires your brain in fundamental ways um you it rewire it primes you for caretaking as a as a mother in a way which is far more visceral and far it's it's pre-rational it's it's immensely transformative experience and it's permanent you know once you've been rewired for mummy brain you'd never really go back um and that from the point of view of raising a child that matters um because when after a baby is born it's you know as winnicott once said you know there's no such thing as a baby there's only a baby and someone there's a a baby doesn't exist as an independent entity until it's some years some years into its life arguably quite a few years into its life um and what I would say about artificial wounds is that you may be you may think that what you're doing is creating a baby without the misery of gestation but what you're doing in practice is creating a baby without creating a mother because a pregnancy doesn't just create a baby it also creates a mother"

• Comment

  • This is alluding to our altricial nature, which makes us human INTERbeings from before birth
  • https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&tag=altricial
  • We are socially entangled even before our birth

!- work on self : entangle with work on others - Loy acknowledges the fact that one cannot truly work on the self in isolation, - lest it actually increase the root separation that is the cause of the problem we have - working on breaking the illusion of the self-concept is also working on clearly seeing our entanglement with the other