nobody is to blame

Podcast summaries

• Keywords: Eric Chisholm Sarah McManus Conversation As Medium blindspot feedback is hard (but possible!) ottergroup fishbowl frame dialogue frame blindspot Circling Liminal Space Agency NNTD upward spiral fuel the upward spiral nobody is to blame What is Blame? building trust out of distrust trust-dancing is an element of all human interactions Game A Game B Circling NVC NNTD has let me see how certain attempts towards trust-building will fail to build non-naive trust obvious

• 1:08:46 - 1:23:39 - A few principles I learned from my time with LSA upward spiral fuel the upward spiral What is Blame? nobody is to blame building trust out of distrust trust-dancing is an element of all human interactions
  • 1:09:56 - M > Yeah, yeah, that's a great, great question. I've been working on a couple of pieces of writing on those fronts that I'm trying to figure out what to do with. Some of them would make most sense as internal documents to people who were already kinda in that scene, including, you know, dozens of people who have you know, just come to one workshop that we ever hosted, but have an appreciation for the thing or whatever. But then like I also want to post something to my blog. In some ways, the core two pieces are these maps of these two different dynamics, which you could call a downward spiral and the upward spiral. And then a list of what were called commitments and assumptions for how to kinda enact the upward spiral dynamic. And where I've come to it now is that... like, I was just a couple days ago, rereading some of these pieces and models and stuff, and I still basically resonate with the description of the upper spiral and downward spiral. Basically, the downward spiral is caused by guilt and an undermining of self trust, and so when people are trying to figure out what it makes sense to do, they second guess their own internal compass, and generate behaviors that are trying to do good by some external authority or something, but are undermining some internal sense that they have. Which then generates guilt because - or sorry, no, which then generates some sort of behavior that kicks into gear to meet their own needs that they've been ignoring, because they're trying to do the right thing according to somebody else. Which then generates guilt, because they're not doing the thing that they're supposed to do according to the external authority. Which then reinforces the idea that they should force themselves to do things that they don't want to do, in order to be good. And then there's this kinda... yeah, I mean, whipping around back and forth. You can sort of see the spiral shape of that, and the reason it goes downward is because it's, it's opposed to itself in a certain fundamental sense, and there's a kind of striving to only have the good and none of the bad, [to] only have the right and none of the wrong. But the way that it's striving creates the very wrongness that it's trying to avoid, by sort of dualistically reifying the rightness of the other thing, and by being unable to kind of listen to the other half of things. So that's kind of the downward spiral dynamic, and then the upward spiral dynamic comes from deepening in self trust, and a sense that you can learn by doing and by... language is so messy here, because on the one hand, I want to say learn by doing and by making mistakes, but the whole meaning of what a mistake is kind of even changes here as well. Like, it's, there's a kind of, like, "everything's a mistake," and also "nothing's a mistake and it's all just learning." And being able to see that and really relax into it generates a different kind of possibility where the things that are in tension in the downward spiral, or rather, in isolation, can sorta become used to form some part of a larger whole that is able to more directly be in touch with what it wants because it's not denying what it wants in service of something else. And so a lot of this resonates with the kind of stuff that's been becoming more popular in in our corner of Twitter, around like non-coercion or non self coercion. It applies to other other people as well, so it's not just the non self coercion, but it's also like, "What does it mean to not coerce others?" And coercion is an interesting word, it's one that we've used to talk about the downward spiral in Upstart context. But it's a pretty uncommon word in a lot of contexts. [Pause] See, I mean, you can maybe map it onto like trying to get a system to perform a different behavior without regard for why it's already performing the behavior it's performing, and [whether] it makes sense for it to be doing what it's doing. Like, that's a way of describing what coercion is, and so self-coercion [is] somebody who's like, "Oh, I just need to get up early. I should set my alarm earlier" or something, right? There's like an element of not respecting that, "No, I don't JUST need to get up earlier, if I did, I would already be doing it. So there's some other thing going on that's making it so I'm not just doing that," and then similarly with other behavior as well.
  • 1:15:17 - M > And so there's this list of commitments and assumptions that point at... that actually come out of the experience of the founders of the Upstart scene. [They are] of this period of time when the culture kind of felt like it really clicked into place, and then they kind of wrote a list of like, "What were we doing? What were we assuming? What were we feeling? How were we relating to each other that was generating this?" And the list has things on it, like, "Everything we know, and everything everyone knows is a model of how things are" or as Monty Python put it, "it's only a model." "Not knowing is a necessary and creative state as part of understanding and action." There's elements of these assumptions that, you know, connect with stuff from the Dharma, right? Like, you know, "Being fundamentally happy is worthwhile and attainable", "Everyone wants closeness, and autonomy, and these are compatible", "Everyone wants to be accepted as they are and also to change and these are compatible", "No one is right, no one is wrong, no one is to blame for anything," was one of the assumptions that people would often take the most issue with, when sort of presented with this list of like, "What do you mean, no one is right [and] no one is wrong?" like. And there's a whole thing, you know, that we could go into now or at some other point about, like, "what's really going on with blame? Like, what is blame?" I have some, again, half written notes about this, but it seems to me that there's a sense in which blame is confused, sort of like how geocentrism is confused. It's like geocentrism makes a lot of intuitive sense, man; like, it sure looks like we're in the middle and everything else is going around. But you can find a perspective from which you're like, "Well, that's sort of true, but there's an us spinning thing more than there is a 'things going around'ness of us, except for the moon." But, where I've come to with thinking about these commitments and assumptions and so forth, is that they work great as a short term experimental thing. Like, if you're doing a weekend workshop, which is one of the things that they were originally used for. Like, you know, you get a bunch of group of people together for a weekend and say, "Hey, we're gonna try out this new culture thing. Here's the basic operating principles." I sometimes like to use the analogy of like, "there's three simple rules that you can give to some triangles moving around the screen, that will cause them to behave as flocking birds." It's like "Don't bump into each other, but otherwise try to get close to each other and face in the same direction." And if you give the triangles those rules, they form very complex flocking dynamics without any top-down control. And so, you know, the idea is, "this is a sort of flocking behavior for humans." And that works great for a weekend, but the commitments and assumptions don't actually have written into them anywhere, "what to do, if you find yourself unable to reasonably assume something," or, "what to do if you find yourself feeling conflicted about a particular commitment." And so, as far as the longer term learning process goes, I've come to recognize, like, "Well, yeah, it's valuable for people to get a taste of these by just trying to go directly to them," like [to] get a feel for what the upward spiral feels like. But then if you're trying to actually live it in an ongoing, permanent way, which is possible - I can say it's possible in the same way that someone who knew enough thermodynamics could say that flight was possible. Like it's just clearly possible. If you're trying to get there more consistently, it's like, well, you've got to actually really slow down and integrate every voice inside you that says, "But no, somebody is wrong," or "But no, I am right," or, "But no, like being close and having autonomy aren't compatible." Like, you know, we have tons of learnings like this, and the bioemotive retreat was, for me, one of the things that sort of kick started my sense of like, "Wait, I've been trying to like push away all of my voices that disagree with what I, in some sense, do accurately know are the best principles that I could have for navigating my life." Like, in some sense, I know that and it's true. And yet, in another sense, other parts of me don't know it, and arguing with them, you know, trying to just tell them "No, no, no, you don't get it, it's like this" doesn't work. It in fact, perpetuates the very downward spiral on a smaller scale by saying "This way is right, that way is wrong. What are you doing? You're confused." as opposed to "Oh, well...". Part of what's neat is like the place I've come to, instead, is actually like, "I'm so grounded in these principles being right, in the way that they're right, that I don't need to defend them," and that gives me way more space to listen to my own or others objections. It's like similarly to like, at one point, I was hanging out with somebody and we were talking about square footage of something. And they multiplied two numbers, and were off by an order of magnitude. And I was like, "No, no, no it's approximately a hundred, not approximately a thousand." And they were like, "No," and I like double checked my own math and was like, "No, it's definitely the thing I said, but I'll wait. Like, take as long as you need to do the math, I trust that you can do the math, and you will come to the same conclusion as me. And you know, if you try for a couple minutes and you're still like, 'No,' then I mean, I'll check again. But I don't need to argue with you because it's sort of self evidently true from the right vantage point". And so that's been really cool - realizing that everything everybody knows, is in one sense, only a model inside our heads and is in another sense, self evidently true from some vantage point. And so being like, "Well, my model is better than your model." It's like, "Well, maybe, but, what does your model see that mine might not see." And so this starts to get into some of the Non Naive Trust dance pieces of like, one of the most core elements of the Non Naive Trust dance is respecting all distrust that arises. Like all distrust is knowing something, and you can't build trust starting from a place of "You should already trust." And this was, in principle, something that was totally part of the ethos of Upstart the whole time, that you can't just say "You should trust me," but there were still ways in which we were kind of both internally and interpersonally demanding of people that they trust when they couldn't, on the basis, perhaps, of them having trusted at some other moment without recognizing that the compartmentalization involved meant that you're actually dealing with a different sense making process inside the person and that sense making process couldn't trust the same thing that some other sense making process inside the same person could, because it was working with different knowings.

post-blame apology

• Warning: this is an advanced technique, to be practiced in contexts that already have some amount of shared frame on why you might want to do away with apology altogether, and why nobody is to blame / blame is a confusion.
  • (edit much later: eh I think it's potentially fine for anyone to use it. not that there aren't downsides but this isn't the central one)
  • You might get some mileage out if it in other contexts, but I make no guarantees about those contexts. I mean, I can't make guarantees in any case, since there's no way to communicate correctly or incorrectly - there's just what works in context and what doesn't work, so if you try this and it doesn't work for someone, it doesn't work for them.
  • Relatedly: don't apologize to angry mobs making demands, because then they'll conclude that since you admitted you were wrong, they must be right, and they'll try to enact ever more from you.

March 12th, 2021

• Interesting approach to post-blame - nobody is to blame and nobody is named "Cheryl"
  • Meet Cheryl: Your coliving nemesis