 Okay, we're back. We're back because this is community matters because community does matter. And the magic word for the day is Lewis Herman. You're going to learn a lot from Lewis Herman today. So take notes. The final, however, will be an oral final administered later after the show. So not to worry about that. Okay. Welcome to the show, Lewis. I'm ready. Are you ready? Thanks, sure. Yeah. Okay. If anybody has questions, send them to shows with S at thinktecawaii.com and we will make Lewis answer them. So Lewis, you had your favorite 200 slides you wanted to talk about. Why don't I let you start with that and then I can interrupt you if the mood strikes. Sure. Sounds great. Thanks. What are we going to talk about? What are we going to talk about? Well, the title of the show is envisioning a post-pandemic world. But on thinking more deeply about it, it occurred to me that we got a problem with understanding. Just what a pandemic is, how it came about. And we have an even deeper problem about how we come to a shared understanding of what's real, of what's really going on. And then what's even more complicated is what is our common good. Clearly, anybody looking at politics in the most superficial way will see that this is highly contested. You've got a profusion of fake news stories, conspiracy theories, various dangerous, bizarre, fundamentalist beliefs that people are actually prepared to go to war over and are going to war over. You can tell from what Lewis has said so far that he comes from South Africa, that he spent some time in the Israeli Defense Force, and that he teaches political science at West Oahu campus. West Oahu. You can tell all of that from those few sentences. Please continue Lewis. West Oahu is actually a remarkably innovative campus. We take pride in the thinking of ourselves as the leading edge of innovation in the UH system. It's the newest campus, the most rapidly growing campus in the nation, actually. And so there's a lot of new thinking happening there. Do ascribe to the notion that as you move west, there's more innovation, that humankind moves west to follow the sun. And that is sort of a natural progression, anthropological progression for humanity moving west. Right. Certainly since the 16th century, the explosion of Western Europe, because that whole business of creating the world that we living in, industrial capitalism, was essentially a West European invention that drew from all civilizations, the whole history of humanity. But it moved from Europe, obviously, westwards to the new world. And then through the new world, you know, go west, young man, expanding the boundaries, and then across the Pacific. And now, you know, the leading edge seems to be the Pacific Rim, where East meets West, and we come back to the point where we started and begin to understand it for the first time to paraphrase the words of T.S. Eliot's famous poem. We don't even know who we are until we go back to beginnings. And that's one of the things that I want to talk about. Yes, wonderful, wonderful, what a great start. Anyway, please continue. Yes, you know, clearly we've got a problem with understanding, you know, what reality is and how we get that knowledge. And this goes to the highest level. This is hardly contested. And so I want to start off really with a foundational experience that every single human being has when we wake up to consciousness in this world. And so part of this process of recovering, how we get to a shared understanding of reality and the common good, what is the best way for us to live, not just as individuals, because obviously we connected to other humans, not just our families, but our community, the entire species. And this has never been more apparent as our problems, our most local problems are so conspicuously global. So, you know, we forced to think of this relationship between our own experience of waking up and how we come to believe what we believe and everybody else's. Everybody else thing, I just, it dawns on me that if you look at the 16th, 17th, 18th, even 19th century, well, let's stop at the 18th for a moment. People didn't have ways to communicate their thoughts to somebody, except in person. Or by the written word in a newspaper or a book. But in terms of immediate social media type connection, that's in the last 10 or 15 years is all it is. And that, I'm just really a question I'm asking, and that must have changed what you're talking about. This notion of community, of waking up and thinking of other people elsewhere, of comparing notes about life in general. This has been an increasingly high octane, logarithmically high octane every day with social media and all the ways we communicate. Doesn't that change it? Doesn't it change it profoundly now? Absolutely. Absolutely. And that's why this moment in history is so extraordinary, because we faced with the most extreme crisis humanity has ever faced with the entire biosphere is threatened. But we've also never had a clearer idea or at least the possibility of getting a clearer shared understanding of our global situation. And what it means to be human on this evolving earth on this fragile living planet, which we've discovered to actually be living it's not a dead space where humans do their clever stuff. But the great genius is actually in the living earth itself, which of course, created the creative human being, as we now understand. Now that's a fact of science, but we still haven't begun to assimilate that into our way of feeling and acting. And that is one of the purposes of all my teaching and in part this talk. So if we can maybe go on to the next slide, then we can start this process of how we come to a shared understanding of what is real and what is good and what is true next. So this is a basic existential situation, the basic situation of existence of every single human being on the planet. We wake up in a story that is already underway. In part, obviously, this is the story of the earth, which we now know gave birth to the human over 3 million years and the modern form of the human with our capacity for creativity and self reflection, the beginning of culture about 100,000 years ago. Where we come from is the deepest mystery and the deepest thinkers who confronted this experience have generally refer to this this great ineffable and indescribable unspeakable mystery as God, the source the ground of being where we going is also a deep mystery. But it's clear that in this situation, there's a lot that we can know, but there's no certainty. There's no certainty about where we come from who we are and where we're going. But it's also equally obvious that we can make mistakes. And so every single one of us is embarked on a truth quest. And as we wake up as as babies and a family as we mature, we realize that we're not the center of the world, our parents, siblings, the larger tribe. Every human being is a center of their own world and we've got to try and make sense of this and this is a huge shock psychologically to the individual growing up and also stimulus we bond we connect we communicate and gradually we make sense of our world. What I'm suggesting is that this process is composed of several elements for basic practices, which is the default mode of human beings making sense of their world. And this is embedded in the structure of our consciousness. And in early human societies and how to gather is the simplest form of human society, essentially non literate pre literate hunter gatherers, and we live this way making sense of our lives. Like this for 100,000 years before the beginning of variety at least 100,000 years before the beginning of writing and specialized knowledge. Yeah, so you know you said something about great thinkers and great leaders. And I know that when you say that correct me if I'm wrong, you're thinking about the Greeks and the Roman thinkers, the ones who established so many things that are threaded in our globalization global civilization now even now. And what what comes to mind is, you know, can you can you do this process you're describing without great thinkers. You know, it's like it's like ants or bees, you have to have a leadership, what they call the mother and the ant leader, the queen, the queen, you have to have somebody who's willing to lead the species. And maybe Socrates was really fabulous. Do we have Socrates today, we have too many people pretending to be Socrates is a quality of our thinking by our thought leaders as good as it was in the days of Socrates. Can we do this if we don't have emerging leaders. Yeah, okay so short answer to that is that what we discovering and what is so unique about our moment is that every single one of us is the emerging leader that we're looking for. And the reason for this. Again, if you follow this model of the truth quest this four part model of the truth quest which I'll introduce in a moment if we get to that slide. One of the elements is the big picture, the big narrative the big story of who we are and where we come from. There we go. So they're four elements there you know the the top left is the whole person. This is the where we start off, you know realizing we start off thinking that we the center of the world. We see everything through our own experience, the family we born into the language we speak the place we born into the time we born into gradually as we grow age In the last five we encountered others maybe earlier, and our way of encountering realities through discussion through face to face contact with other human being sharing the same space, our siblings up there and neighbors than the larger community, who obviously have their own way of seeing the world, their similarities we can agree to some extent through language through face to face communication, but we'll never share one another stories exactly. And then this whole process is supported by involvement in community that first shapes our consciousness gives us our language, and we overwhelmed by community we brainwashed me become robots, unless we have a creative role in that community and that's what And the more egalitarian the community the more we can do that. So, community involvement is another element of all orienting yourself in reality. For the Greeks, you know that give us this notion of politics is caring about the good of the community. In community affairs, if you didn't regard it as your highest aspiration for individual excellence. They called you an idiot, the word idiot is not an insult it just means someone who doesn't care about public affairs. And unfortunately what we've had with the rise of civilization, from about 5000 years ago, increasingly stratified systems of domination with chiefs, emperors, kings, queens, powerful leaders that emerge from powerful tribal leaders. It's kind of a distortion of this basic model of truth questing, because instead of having every individual be author and agent of their own worldview, you have a worldview imposed on you. Now what happened with Socrates and the people to get back to your question with the great thinkers of what philosophers historians are called the axial age. Socrates, the Buddha, Confucius, Lao Tzu, Zarathustra, the Hebrew prophets, all the way up to Christ and even Mohammed, they're really saying one thing, essentially, as great quote from Morton Shaw about Christ moving through life like a burning wheel. And everyone he touched, he said one thing, wake up, wake up, wake up. And what wake up means is that you've got to take charge of your own worldview, because no matter how smart your emperor is or your philosopher or your guru, they never you, they don't have your world of experience. What this means is that democracy and participation in a democratic egalitarian community is a fundamental aspect of sanity of having a grip on reality. And we see a form of politics now, where this is denied to most people because of the structure of, you know, highly complex mass bureaucratic societies where your participation in politics is reduced to a vote during elections. And we know why most people don't, many people don't vote, because they feel it's insignificant. They're choosing between Tweedledum and Tweedledeed, two versions of essentially the same thing both committed to this highly bureaucratic, essentially oppressive structure, which has become more so. You know, America used to be ranked, I think it was the World Democratic Index, ranking nations, or they rank about 154 nations across the world. America was in 2006 was ranked as a full democracy, number 17 in the world of democracies. In 2006, it was labeled a flawed democracy. And it was halfway down. So we less democratic than we were in 2006. And that was in 2016. Since then, I think we've fallen, you know, to close to banana republics in some respects, in terms of political corruption. Yeah, on that point, your notion of self examination, self awareness, finding finding the truth, it seems to assume goodwill. It seems to assume is sort of a bottom line of goodwill that all the people involved in that pie chart. They're all looking with a clear goodwill and sincerity, you know, decency. But you know, life experience teaches us, this goes back to my mammalian theory that I told you about that, you know, for any number of reasons that I had an unhappy childhood. You know, chemistry has done this to me. I'm just, I'm the bad seed. What, you know, I don't know how you explain a guy like Hitler, you know, how he could do those things. But there are some people out there that are not decent. They're not good. They're not sincere. I mean, some of them are, some of them Lewis, maybe in Washington, right now, as a matter of fact. So how, how, how do you fold your approach around people like that? Okay, so that's a very good question. The truth quest getting in touch with reality begins with a basic assumption that everything is connected, and that we connected to everyone else. That's the starting point of philosophy. If you don't buy into that, you, you, you're in a serious state of psychological and cultural pathology. And this suggests that's where our society is not because that's human nature, but because of choices made the unintended consequences of choices made by some of our best and brightest some of our most creative and brilliant philosophers, who fashioned the world that we live in, who gave the philosophical principles in which, for example, the Constitution of the United States is founded and many other constitutions and many other democracies. It was an enormous achievement in the 17th century and 16th century, some of these thinkers were, and then developed in the 18th century, but it was fashioned out of an understanding that is three centuries out of date. It was flimsy to start off with assumptions were made about nature human nature, which is simply wrong. They don't stand up to what we now know, but they were right at the time. They were better than what was going on before. Better than the divine right of kings, better than the corruption of feudalism. So the failure here is that it was not nimble enough that it should have changed with the times. These guys back in the 18th century, they didn't know how things would change. Exactly. And they tried to build in a change mechanism to recognize and address changes, but they couldn't they couldn't see it. So we have failed to change over the couple centuries that follow. Exactly. So this is the possibility that we presented with now we understand the mechanism by which those philosophers created their worldview. That mechanism is the truth quest, what I'm calling the truth quest, this model that I just put up these basic four basic practices that were the default mode of being human. We all do them. Even illiterates can do them. You don't have to be a genius or even literate to do it. It's a default mode of making sense of your world. But it's been eliminated systematically unintentionally from my educational system and from our political culture. What I'm suggesting is that we have now the possibility of building this in to all our policies and institutions. Henceforth moving forward. This needs to be the number one moral and epistemological and practical political imperative. It makes you think that can be done. I mean, you just said that we lost it unintentionally over the at least a couple of hundred years of the, you know, development of this country. Why can we now recognize that it's missing? I mean, as a group, a community, why can we recognize that it's missing? And why do you feel that now we can fix it if we unintentionally lost it for all this time? Well, we can fix it because we can understand it and bring it to the level of consciousness, which our founding fathers couldn't. They didn't have the big picture perspective, the big story that gives us the insight into what these practices are and how fundamental they are to being human. They emerge 100,000 years ago. We lived by them in small bands, egalitarian, relatively democratic, relatively peaceful, spiritually guided bands of hunter gatherers for about 100,000 years. Some still survived into modern times, relatively modern times, like the Sun Bushman, the Bayaka Pygmies of Central Africa, many Native American tribes, indigenous cultures retained elements of this. The West Europe, Western Europe Asia recovered elements of this during the Axial Age. That is the birth of all the great religions and common to them all is the structure of the truth quest. That's what I'd argue that this truth quest is actually a kind of meta religion. It's what's at the heart. It's the spiritual and epistemological or scientific insight into the heart of what it means to be human. That classical civilizations were losing. From about 5000 years ago on, human beings lived in societies that were based on domination, stratification, specialization, hierarchy, warfare, world cities and slavery. That is massive trauma to the psyche of anybody living in those societies. They're essentially societies that rule by terror. And there are many good times and great achievements in the process. But you don't have the practice of the truth quest being promoted because it undermines, in a sense, anything that is certain. There are no certainties once you're involved in the truth quest. So it's constantly questioning power. And obviously power, you know, this is part of human nature, people have power tend not to want to give it up. The examples of people giving it up. And the examples all over now surfacing across the planet of people starting to do this, starting to truth quest in the profusion of environmental movements, citizen movements, NGOs. The characters like Greta Thunberg, the environmental, the reaction to global. No, they're in charge, Louis. It doesn't seem to me that they're in charge. Absolutely not in charge are like, like Donald Trump, like Putin, like the fellow in Brazil. The guys who are into power seem to be gaining power these days. And democracies, as you mentioned, democracies meet the wrong end of the stick right now. Exactly. Exactly. And that's why this is reaching an end, because people are starting to wake up and they're waking up with outrage. So this was the primary Greek virtue or one of the private about four primary Greek virtues that converge was called Andrea. And it was outrage at injustice. And that's starting to. Is there a medicine for that. The medicine for that is to wake up do something to educate yourself and take some action doesn't matter. I think I have that don't you have that the Andrea. Absolutely. The outrage. And I think that's in part what drives you to do the work that you're doing and I commend it. I think it's great. And this is one of the examples that I'm talking about of this recovery of the truth quest. This, this sense that we basically all connected that we've got to solve these problems together that our lives individually will be much happier more satisfying more beautiful by doing this work. I mean, this is the old reviving the old Greek values. But now we have the possibility to democratize this process. So instead of waiting for some geniuses on high to come down from ivory tiles of academia and enlighten us. This is something that's growing from the grass roots up. And those in power will cease to have power when the people below them cease to believe in them and follow them. If you want to follow the system though you have to make sacrifices. You have to be willing to give things up. There are some things you know the average person's life here in the 21st century. Good food, television entertainment, security security I think is a big this all kinds of things that define a very pleasant life. I don't think a lot of people want to give it up. I don't think they want to sacrifice. But if they go through that analysis, you know, I'm outraged. I want to have a better intellectual life. I'm, I want to do something in order to change this. But at the same time, I don't want to give up the things that I love I want to give that up and I, and I see that as very risky that if I sacrifice myself I will give it up. Right, right. Yeah, I think I think we faced with a possibility now of not having to choose between either and all but both and more. I think that's a situation we have now that you know the comforts that we value the achievements of industrial capitals and the achievements of 5000 years of civilization. We can understand we can hold on to but serving different ends. They don't serve the power of the 1% you know the transfer of wealth that's happened as a result over this absolutely obscene. You know a little bit is trickled down to the unemployed and the hungry, but the corporations have made out like bandits. Well, since what is it 1980 between 1980 and 2016 share of taxes paid by billionaires by the big billionaire corporations has dropped has not increased dropped by 79%. So, you know what we have the possibility of is a wisdom guided market and wisdom guided institutions. It's not a tear anything down, but for everybody wherever you are whatever position of government, whatever corporation you work for, whatever small business you run to start trying to understand the world and act in terms of the good of the whole realizing that if we have a pandemic doesn't matter how wealthy you are doesn't matter how isolated you are it's going to affect you. Similarly, climate change global warming soil erosion or filling the oceans with plastic on and on and on and on increasingly our problems are global. And, you know, the base of that in modern developed society is the collapse of community is an epidemic of depression and loneliness. You know people feel incredibly isolated there's a rise in aggression. We've never really dealt with crime we were to deal with these problems at their roots. Those have been revealed very starkly by COVID. The flaws in our society are visible they're right out there in front of our faces. Then now does that make it easier or more difficult to move into this higher consciousness that you're talking about. I think both, you know, clearly both things are happening was a movement towards increasing control. I think this is an opportunity while every many people are panicking and then confused to grab more pound grab more wealth, but it just makes the whole system unstable. Because, you know, fortunately, thankfully, we have what you referred to earlier a global telecommunications instantaneous. We have access to all this information. What we lack, what is missing from the culture is a way of making sense of this information. And that's why these four practices of the truth quest, I absolutely critical. I think that this is potentially the missing dimension in our political thinking that if we realize that our perception of reality depends on examining our own story and then expanding our own experience and changes everything. We become more humble. We become more open. We involved in an endless process of lifelong learning from everybody we meet. Everybody becomes your teacher. You teach something to everybody you meet the whole the value structure of society is inverted. Instead of having relationships defined primarily as they are now by trying to get material advantage trying to get profit out of people you encounter, which is really a doggy dog world the Hobbesian world. We have an opposite. Everybody you meet is an opportunity to enrich your life. Now this is an ideal. I'm not saying we're going to do this automatically. What I'm suggesting is that these elements be introduced into the curriculum of education at all levels they can be introduced right from the very beginning, because preschoolers are doing this preschoolers are moving out of their own inner world of I'm the center of the universe into a world without the kids and they were relate to other kids, and they've got to be taught the pleasures of establishing relationships, and of trust and of honesty and of love and of sharing, and they real pleasures. In fact, they hire pleasures than the pleasure of stinginess and selfishness and more for myself. That's terribly lonely. You know, we knew this I was very fortunate growing up where I did, because I grew up sort of in the Jewish tribe in, you know, a racist country, where the tribe stuck together in South Africa. And there's a model of the truth quest you know where I've represented the elements pictorially the whole person face to face discussion democratic community. What I realize is that you know when you have the experience of good relationships trusting relationship with friends. Everything else falls into place if you have a crisis if you have a need. The person who loves you is going to share if they've got more than you have. We need to get more of those basic values into society. Right now and with COVID there's one, one particularly stark realization. That is, you know, we, we no longer have face to face. I'm excluding zoom for a moment, but no longer have face to face interaction. This guy earlier this week, his businessman in Florida, he decided to go on with the reopening took his wife out to dinner in a fancy restaurant and they wore masks until the food came in and then they took the mask off to eat. The mask back on and left. And so, you know, but the whole notion is we, we don't see feel touch experience the proximity of another human being, the smell of the grease bank the roar of the crowd or wasn't the other way around the roar of the grease You know, we don't have that and we're talking on zoom now, which I enjoy very much and I get I get to know you that way. But the reality, I'm really asking a question here the reality is, is this help us because there's going to be more of it. This help us achieve this kind of community this kind of perfect decent aspiring community talking about, or is it making more difficult for us, because we don't really get to shake hands. We don't shake hands anymore. I can't feel your hand in mind. Yeah, no, it obviously does both. You know, it helps connect us globally and gives us for the first time, everybody sharing the same global experience to some degree that the global economies that are pulled back stop pretty much. And we were having to deal with it in our own way and we're all looking globally at other nations, the rest of the world to see how they're handling it. So it's an extraordinary moment for contemplation and communication at a global level. And I think zoom is an incredible technology and he's part of this the possibility of waking up. But obviously this is not the end point. And in order to get there, I think we've got to take a deeply look at what generates pandemics, we infectious diseases come from how they tie to the pathology of civilization, and then deal with the problem at its roots. So we're really talking about taking this moment where we are increasingly isolated. And there's an increasing transfer increasing inequality is transfer of wealth goes from the poorest to the richest. All sorts of systems that are breaking down are being exposed now to public view. And this is the opportunity to tell a new story to tell a true bigger story that touches what is deepest in the human. And in order to do that in order to be part of this process, you have to wake up, you have to wake up to these basic four practices. You've got to have a big picture. Who are we where do we come from what is the place of the human on the planet. How is my consciousness constructed. Why is why do I see things slightly differently from you. You know, you've got to get into this business and see that business as not, oh my God, I got to go back to school and go through exams and all of that. But as Socrates pointed out, the highest pleasure. This is actually where we experienced the greatest, deepest satisfaction of being human. So I don't know, can I use that as a segue to show more slides because there's actually, I'd like to give a sense of the narrative what you want to ask more questions. I want to set up another show, because we're, we're out of time, we're already over a few minutes. See how quickly the time goes by. But we have miles to go. We need to we need to establish another show and some shows after that, so we can explore this at the right speed. I am, I am really sorry, but it's going to take a while and I, I love this conversation. And I think this conversation is so constructive. And I hope a lot of people watch this conversation. So they can get the ideas that you're generating. Yeah, can I can I just say that, you know, in this jumping around this back and forth which is a great example of one of the processes. We haven't been able to construct a coherent big picture. And at some point that's really what the slides do, you know, go about 2030 slides that give this big picture of this, the structure how this emerges. I was repressed in the 17th century by this formula that we bought into it's not human nature. We made sure we fought battles over whether or not to buy into john lock. You know, Bob's Adam Smith, you know, the founding fathers was left over this. This is a choice. And we created the situation we have now so we can uncreated and create something better. And we can have more battles over it too, you know, absolutely. Absolutely. Thank you very much. I really appreciate these conversations. And to me, I'm sincere when I tell you I want to continue it. And we'll set up another time to do that. Then hold on to the slides. Okay. Okay, yeah, we can do every single slide. Yeah. Yeah, I love to. It's been a terrific pleasure. This is what I love to take care to stay safe.