When topics are urgent and perspectives diverge, dyadic conversations routinely calcify into “fights,” a conversational structure where each side experiences the other as trying to make them lose. Reciprocal escalation guarantees that both lose and the relationship degrades.

The Center for Creative Conflict Resolution promotes “JustConflict” as an operational pivot. It helps participants detect the moment a conversation shifts into a win/lose frame and replaces it with a mutually accountable conversation that restores equity and grows intimacy.

Converting Fights into Intimacy-Building Conversations

- The Operating Unit of Relationship: The content of the relationship is the conversation, not the individuals themselves. The depth varies, with intimacy as the apex state marked by mutual accountability.

We tend to think that a relationship is made up of people, and certainly that is true in the material or personal dimension, but there are other dimensions and the most important one for this issue is the relational or the interpersonal dimension. In this dimension of being the phenomenon we are exploring is the structure which the persons create by their interactions, which we call conversations. I may have a physical relationship with the bagger at the grocery store, but that physical relationship is augmented when we talk to each other. I may have had no contact with someone I knew in high school, but when I see them at the reunion, we find that we still have a relationship.

Within the relational dimension, the conversation is the element that creates the system we are calling a relationship. The quality of the relationship depends on the quality of the conversation. The highest quality conversations arise between persons who share equal power—they are mutual—and they are ones in which both take into account what is going on with the other.

- The Conditions That Trigger Fights: When two parties engage around a topic they both care about but interpret differently (meaning-making, aims, approaches), urgency and threat perception drive the exchange into a zero-sum frame.

A conversation will necessarily have a topic. My conversation with the grocery bagger may be about putting the lighter weight items on top, or it might be about the weather. For the conversation to work, we will have to be talking about the same things.

Whatever the topic is, we will see it differently. Sometimes the differences are very small, and sometimes they are huge. But because we are different, we see differently.

Sometimes the differences matter to us, and sometimes they don’t. The placement of the eggs in my bag is more urgent for me than whether we think it is going to rain. Different topics have different weight.

If the relationship is one that has a higher level of intimacy, and the topic is one that we both care deeply about, and the meaning we each make is very different, we will find that the conversation has a vivid sense of urgency. This may result in a fight.

- The Mechanics of a “Fight” Structure: Each party experiences the other as attempting to make them lose. This perceived coercion converts urgency into reactive escalation (stridency, dominance maneuvers), reframing “winning” as the other’s surrender rather than joint progress.

We can observe that it is nearly always true that the parties to the relationship each see the other as having started the fight. It may be that the only thing they can agree on is that the other started it. Fights start when it feels as though the other is trying to make us lose.

If one is explaining their position and the other says “no,” it will seem as though the other is trying to make them lose. In the context of a relationship in which we hope to create intimacy of any kind, in which we are having a conversation about something that is urgent for both of us, and in which we become clear that we see the issue differently, it is very hard to not have the conversation become a fight.

- While there are contexts in which Win/Lose Is Legitimate, the outcome can be Systemic Failure: Competitive systems (elections, sports) normalize making the other lose. Intimate, mutually accountable relationships do not. In a win/lose conversation, that is, a fight, both parties lose. Short-term compliance may occur (“saying uncle”), but relationship health, equity, and the capacity for future collaboration erode. When we import win/lose into dyadic conversations, we destroy the very conditions needed for intimacy.

We live in a world in which win/lose conversations are common. While there are games that don’t create a winner, most commonly played games are ones in which the point of the game is to win, and the winner is the one who makes the other lose.

Clearly wars are fights. Boxing matches are fights. And in both the one who is declared the winner looks like they have lost. But in most sports… certainly team sports… the strategy for winning is to make the other lose. We play both offense and defense.

Politics is a game in which the aim is to get more of the voters to vote for you. Part of the strategy is to appeal to the voter, but this is paired with explaining why not to vote for the “opponent.”

It is no surprise that we are culturally predisposed to fighting.

But if the relationship is one in which we want to build intimacy, it is important that our conversations not be fights. Intimacy only builds in the context of conversations in which we enjoy mutuality, that is, we have equal power, which means neither of us dominates the other. Furthermore, we must be accountable in that we can give an account of ourselves while also taking into account the perspective of the other, especially when they are very different from us.

- JustConflict emphasizes early detection of fight dynamics and the deliberate shift to conversations that restore mutuality: This approach involves listening to the other’s lived experience, accounting for one’s own, and rebalancing power to enable shared meaning-making and sustained intimacy.

The first step to building intimacy, or repairing it when it is damaged, is to notice when we are in a fight and shifting the conversation into one in which we embody mutual accountability. This shift can be very simple structurally, but it often feels impossible emotionally. For this reason, we start by stopping the fight and paying attention to just what it is that we are each feeling and what it is we each need. This is called “taking a time out.” We do this to stop the fight.

But at some point we will have to return to the conversation in order to build or rebuild the relationship. How to do that is the subject of JustConflict. Learning these tools is the focus of the class 10 Disciplines for Building Healthy Relationships and of the video series on YouTube entitled “Speak the Helpful Truth.”

In a conversation with Michael Pollan and Krista Tipett on her podcast On Being, recorded in New York City and published on May 16, 2026, Krista asked Michael about the origins of consciousness. He has studied various theories which he has chronicled in his book, A World Appears, A Journey into Consciousness. He says he has no definitive answer as to what causes consciousness, but he notes that there are three theories, each with something to recommend it, but none of which carry the day, and there appears no clear way to combine them.

The theory we are most familiar with is that consciousness is an emergent property of the activities of our brains. He is dismissive of the notion of emergence offering that it is as substantive as waving one’s hand and saying “abracadabra.” But the concept is that there is something about the actions of neurons that result in the construction of consciousness. I will note that this theory gets support by the observation that the introduction of certain anesthetizing chemicals into the body will result in a loss of consciousness while maintaining brain function.

The second theory is that there is a field of consciousness that exists outside of us which our brains tap into much as a radio receiver picks up signals from an electro-magnetic field that is external to itself. This is a common perception for people who are on psychedelics. This theory might explain how we can store so much information in our memories. Our brains are able to post them “to the cloud.” But then why can we retrieve the memories or ideas of others? Why can’t we read each other’s minds?

The third theory suggests that awareness, and thus consciousness, is a property of all systems, and is most visible in the behavior of complex adaptive systems, but is present everywhere in everything in a more simple form. All systems have an interior, though only the most complex systems are able to be self-aware.

I have great respect for Michael Pollan and love his work. But I think he is missing something here.

First, he is far more dismissive of emergence than I would expect of a science writer of his scope and depth. I recommend Steven Johnson’s 2001 book Emergence; the connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software. That systems composed of simple elements can create complex structures is widely observed and documented.

The properties of emergence are to the science of complexity what the Law of Three of GI Gurdjieff is to the disciplines of philosophy and theology. My summation of the Law of Three is that,

“When the three are held in tension, a fourth arises in a new dimension.”

The easiest example of emergence to understand is that of fire. To have a fire you need fuel, oxygen, and heat. If you have all three in sufficient density and proximity, you will have fire. If you take away any of the three, the fire goes out.

Just so, the experience of consciousness is a product of the three held in tension with each other in sufficient density and proximity. The field of consciousness exists everywhere all the time, just as do the fields of gravity and electromagnetism. In the created world there systems which all have as an aspect of their being an interior. Which is to say that there is something that it is like to be them. The more robust expression of consciousness is found in the complexity of a neural system like that found in humans.

That neural net, as a feature of the interiority of the organism, is able to connect to the larger field of consciousness. The subjective experience of consciousness depends on the presence and interaction of all three. The three: An organism which can be aware of its own interior, implemented by the complexity of its neural network, which allows it to connect with the field of consciousness.

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To review where we are in this consideration of the Four Vectors;

• We experience the greatest level of personal satisfaction when we live in the confluence of that we are best equipped to do and that which the world most needs. When these two are aligned, we feel the joy that comes from being “in flow,” and we are being the greatest help to those with which we share the planet.

• Finding this alignment is complex and dynamic. It is the product of multiple interdependent variables and it is always changing. It helps us greatly to have a heuristic, a cognitive map that aides us in finding and staying in alignment… in flow.

• The metaphor we are using as a frame for this map is that of a braid I am calling the Braid of Meaning and Purpose. It is made up of four strands, each of which plays a vital role.

• Each strand is a vector, which is to say it is grounded in a point which is now, is pointed in a direction which is the aim, and has a value which is the importance of resolving a set of tensions and which is the contribution it makes to the totality of the braid.

In this post I want to explore the tensions that form and inform each of the Vectors. These are important to notice. We mostly don’t like the tensions in our lives. But these are creative tensions and not ones we must avoid or resolve but rather open ourselves to as a source of creative energy.

As we fold these Four Vectors into the Braid of Meaning and Purpose we encounter tensions within them and between them. In the case of a length of rope, the tension is formed by twisting the strands in opposite directions. In the case of the metaphorical braid, the tensions come from competing aims. It is the tensions between the strands that give the braid its strength. These tensions may seem abstract as we talk about them, so I will offer examples that I hope will help you discover how these tensions arise for you.

[I have been naming the Vectors with numbers because it makes sense to me to explore them in a particular order, but it is hard to keep track of their respective domains. Therefore, I am going to try adding a descriptor. I am not certain of how well they work. This is, after all, a work in progress. So for the moment I am going with these names: Vector One: Personal; Vector Two: Relational; Vector Three: Unique; and Vector Four: Global.

Let me know what you think.]

Vector One: Personal

Perhaps the earliest tension we experience is between what I am experiencing and what I am choosing. Does my choice control or even inform what I experience? Does my choice matter? Of course, sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t. And so we have a tension that guides us to discern which of the choices that appear to us are the ones we want to focus on because those choices will most likely influence our experiences.

The infant says, my body feels uncomfortable in some way. All I can do is cry. Will crying create a change for me that will alleviate my discomfort?

As we consider these choices, we notice that there are many things we could choose at any instant. We find that some outcomes are more desirable than others, and so we attend to the choices most likely to create those desired outcomes. But how do we choose? What are the qualities of the outcomes that we most want to work to create?

As we look at the qualities of the possible outcomes we may find, when we are sufficiently mindful, that some of the things we most desire are not the things which are most likely to improve the quality of our lives. Striving for what I want may not create what I need. Needs and wants are not the same and, indeed, sometimes getting what we want will result in the opposite of what we need.

The adult says, I feel a discomfort, an anxiety, I say to myself, “I need a drink.” I take a drink. Then I have another drink, and another drink, and then I no longer feel anxious, and then I wake up in the morning with a hangover.

The aim of any organism, if it is to be healthy, is to make choices which move it toward what it needs. In every moment we are assessing what is happening in the world we inhabit and decide what to do, ideally to move us toward what we need.

I say ideally because it can be hard to know what we need. Sometimes needs are subtle and sometimes they are in conflict with each other. Most often we just act to get what we want, and what we want may be in conflict with what we and those around us need.

Two of the tensions that are central to the formation of Vector One are those

• between what we observe to be happening to us and the choices that are available to us [Do my choices matter? Do I matter?], and

• between the aims that are most desirable, and those that are most fulfilling [will this choice move me toward what I want or toward what I need?]

Thus, the central aim of Vector One: Personal is to determine what I need and to make the choices necessary to create it.

Vector Two: Relational

While Vector Two arises in relation to the world around us, the vector is not the construction of the World telling us who we should be and what we should do, but rather the vector we each construct in response to what the World is telling us. When the World tells us what to do or what is expected of us…

“Clean your room!”,

we then are invited to consider what our aim is in the context of our relationship with the World.

“Do I want to clean my room? Do I know how? How will what I choose to do inform whether I am getting what I want or what I need?

The consideration of Vector Two is “what do I want the relationship I have with the World to be like? What do I desire as the qualities of those myriad relationships and what choices are available to me to create that?”

One of the consequences of our aim to create what we need is the recognition that many of our needs are accessed only through our relationships with those around us. We can’t have what we need outside of the context of those who care for us.

What do I need to do to create a secure attachment to those parent figures on whom I depend for my life?

The other in the relationship is acting toward us out of a set of assumptions about who we are. Who they see us as being may not be who we see ourselves as being. There is a tension between who we think we are and who they think we are or who they want us to be. If this is a relationship in which we think we can get what we need, it may behoove us to be more of who the other expects us to be.

Sometimes my dad tells me that I am being stupid. I want to argue with him, but if I fight with him he may not take me fishing this weekend.

Another tension stems from whether this relationship matters to us. Is this relationship, among all of the infinite number of relationships that are available to me, one that is important to enough that I will give it enough of my finite attention that I can nurture it enough that I will be able to get what I need? How much attention do I have to give, and does this warrant some of it, or as much of it as others in the relationship demand?

My new girlfriend is really hot but she is so high maintenance that I am not sure I can give her the attention she demands.

Given that the other in the relationship is telling me who I am to them, is it valuable to me to seek to align myself with who they tell me I am? How does the tension between how they see me and how I see me get resolved in the way I construct this vector for meaning and purpose?

Thus these various tensions ultimately come down to one. To the extent that I can know what the other’s aim is for the relationship we have [and by extension, who the other sees me as being or wants me to be], is this close enough to what my aim is for the relationship, and is it a sufficient source for what I need, such that I am willing and able to invest in this relationship by aligning my aim to the other’s?

I like what my boss is willing to pay me, and I am good at what I do, but there is no path for advancement here so it may be time to update my resume.

So the central aim of Vector Two: Relational is the creation and sustenance of those relationships in which we find our needs met.

That is enough for this week. I am already a day late in getting this posted. Next week we will dive into…

Vector Three: Unique

Do I actually have a unique purpose? Do I matter enough that I might seek to know what it is? Can I trust that I am competent to embody my purpose. Will it be safe to know the power that comes from clarity of purpose?

Vector Four: Global

Am I capable and willing to have an integral perspective such that I am responsible for the creation of the collective aim. This is easier to do with a smaller system but it is not less true with a larger one. No one is more responsible that I am. Can I distinguish blame from responsibility such that I am neither blaming others nor myself, but am seeking to be fully responsible.

I have been working on a post which will go into greater depth about the formation of each of the vectors as strands in Braid of Meaning and Purpose. But there is a part of me that just pulls back and says, “So what? What difference does any of this make anyway? This seems to be a lot of effort to pay attention to some pretty mundane things. What is the point of all of this? What good will come of me seeking to clarify for myself the Four Vectors and then fashioning them into this metaphorical braid?”

Good question. A worthy question. A question that deserves an answer.

The first purpose of life is to stay alive. The fundamental goal of life is to sustain itself. If I am still breathing then I must be doing something right. I have made it through another day.

But for all of this effort to seem worth it, I want to have some pleasure. I want to experience shalom. Each sitting beneath his own vine and fig tree. I want to have a place and a partner and a community and to feel safe and satisfied. I want to belong. I want to matter.

And I will assert that everyone and everything does matter. But you hearing that from me may mean very little, especially if you live in a world where those around you seem to be saying that you do not. And I fear that we are moving more and more toward a world where it is hard to believe that we matter.

Further, I observe that when people do not believe that they matter, they behave in ways that compromise the common good. When we don’t know that our choices create our lives, and that we can make choices that are not only better for our personal wellbeing, but are also better for the whole of creation, we fall short of our potential, and we lose the joy that comes from a well lived life.

Yes, it is my assertion that we can all feel a deep and abiding joy, but our ability to embrace that joy depends on our ability and willingness to do the work of clarifying and living into the meaning and purpose of our lives.

Now, I expect that some of you will say, “That is all well and good for you to assert these things, Mark, but you are speaking out of your privilege. You are a first world, white, property owning, cis-gendered, heterosexual, highly educated male.”

All true. I am the poster boy for privilege. But I have discovered that it is my purpose to encourage my fellow humans on this planet to embrace the central privilege we all share, and that is the gift of our humanity.

So, here are some things my privilege has allowed me to discern.

Everyone does better if each of us gets what we need. The system as a whole depends on the well-being of all of the elements in the system. So my first task on behalf of the whole is to create what I need. Healthy organisms are ones that create what they need. Each of us being as healthy as possible is to the benefit of the whole of humanity and of the planet.

My ability to create what I need is greatly enhanced by my knowing what I need. This task is complicated by the fact that what I need is often not what I want. Indeed, often getting what I want is the opposite of what I need. I have a post just about this issue. And the distinction between what I need and what I want is a central tension in the formation of Vector One. It appears to be mundane, but is in fact crucial to our well-being and the well-being of the planet.

So, point number one: the system of life on the planet does best when all of the elements in the system are able to get what they need. My job is to discern what I need, distinguish it from what I want, and create it so that the whole system benefits from my creation of this quality of being.

Point number two: what I need is not the same as what you need. Yes, there are certain things we all need. Nutrition, hydration, breath, but beyond the basics, which most of us are able to have, there are certain other qualities that arise in some contexts more than others. What I need is in many respects very different from a poor Black woman who is trying to take care of her children in a house that lost its roof in the tornado. We are each in a unique situation. What we need is dictated by the circumstances in which we find ourselves. The World needs for us to create what we each need in the contexts in which we find ourselves.

Point number three: the most immediate way to discern what I need is to pay attention to what is bothering me the most. Nothing is more bothersome that not getting what we need. So by noticing what is bothering me I can discover what I need. Now, this is tricky because we are tempted to say that what we need is for others to change what they are doing so we aren’t bothered. I want others to change, but what I need is some quality that is missing from the relationship.

By way of example; some years back there was a guy in my Aggressive Offenders Program who was very clear that he didn’t need the program because he was no longer with the woman he assaulted. He was with someone new and things were great.

Then his new partner had a birthday, which he forgot, and things went south. He knew that what he needed was affection, and he had lots of that before he whiffed on her birthday, but he saw affection as something he got from her, not as something he could create in his relationship with her. What he wanted was for her to return to the relationship they once had, and once again give him the affection that he wanted. He was unable to see that the affection he needed was something he could create in the relationship by giving it to her by, for example, honoring her on her birthday. By creating what he needed those around him would get it too.

Three crucial observations:

• we create what the World needs by creating what we need;

• we have to be able to distinguish what we need from what we want; and

• we can best discern what we need by attending to what is bothering us. We are bothered when we don’t have what we need.

The pursuit of what we need is the aim for each of the Four Vectors.

1. The aim of Vector One is to move toward what we need in this moment.

2. For Vector Two the aim is to create the relationship between ourselves and the World which best supports what we need.

3. Vector Three arises in the context of who we know ourselves to uniquely be while doing what we are best equipped to do.

4. And Vector Four is our contribution to the aim of the organizations of which we are a part.

And each informs the others in the Braid of Meaning and Purpose.

I have been working on a post which will go into greater depth about the formation of each of the vectors as strands in Braid of Meaning and Purpose. But there is a part of me that just pulls back and says, “So what? What difference does any of this make anyway? This seems to be a lot of effort to pay attention to some pretty mundane things. What is the point of all of this? What good will come of me seeking to clarify for myself the Four Vectors and then fashioning them into this metaphorical braid?”

Good question. A worthy question. A question that deserves an answer.

The first purpose of life is to stay alive. The fundamental goal of life is to sustain itself. If I am still breathing then I must be doing something right. I have made it through another day.

But for all of this effort to seem worth it, I want to have some pleasure. I want to experience shalom. Each sitting beneath his own vine and fig tree. I want to have a place and a partner and a community and to feel safe and satisfied. I want to belong. I want to matter.

And I will assert that everyone and everything does matter. But you hearing that from me may mean very little, especially if you live in a world where those around you seem to be saying that you do not. And I fear that we are moving more and more toward a world where it is hard to believe that we matter.

Further, I observe that when people do not believe that they matter, they behave in ways that compromise the common good. When we don’t know that our choices create our lives, and that we can make choices that are not only better for our personal wellbeing, but are also better for the whole of creation, we fall short of our potential, and we lose the joy that comes from a well lived life.

Yes, it is my assertion that we can all feel a deep and abiding joy, but our ability to embrace that joy depends on our ability and willingness to do the work of clarifying and living into the meaning and purpose of our lives.

Now, I expect that some of you will say, “That is all well and good for you to assert these things, Mark, but you are speaking out of your privilege. You are a first world, white, property owning, cis-gendered, heterosexual, highly educated male.”

All true. I am the poster boy for privilege. But I have discovered that it is my purpose to encourage my fellow humans on this planet to embrace the central privilege we all share, and that is the gift of our humanity.

So, here are some things my privilege has allowed me to discern.

Everyone does better if each of us gets what we need. The system as a whole depends on the well-being of all of the elements in the system. So my first task on behalf of the whole is to create what I need. Healthy organisms are ones that create what they need. Each of us being as healthy as possible is to the benefit of the whole of humanity and of the planet.

My ability to create what I need is greatly enhanced by my knowing what I need. This task is complicated by the fact that what I need is often not what I want. Indeed, often getting what I want is the opposite of what I need. I have a post just about this issue. And the distinction between what I need and what I want is a central tension in the formation of Vector One. It appears to be mundane, but is in fact crucial to our well-being and the well-being of the planet.

So, point number one: the system of life on the planet does best when all of the elements in the system are able to get what they need. My job is to discern what I need, distinguish it from what I want, and create it so that the whole system benefits from my creation of this quality of being.

Point number two: what I need is not the same as what you need. Yes, there are certain things we all need. Nutrition, hydration, breath, but beyond the basics, which most of us are able to have, there are certain other qualities that arise in some contexts more than others. What I need is in many respects very different from a poor Black woman who is trying to take care of her children in a house that lost its roof in the tornado. We are each in a unique situation. What we need is dictated by the circumstances in which we find ourselves. The World needs for us to create what we each need in the contexts in which we find ourselves.

Point number three: the most immediate way to discern what I need is to pay attention to what is bothering me the most. Nothing is more bothersome that not getting what we need. So by noticing what is bothering me I can discover what I need. Now, this is tricky because we are tempted to say that what we need is for others to change what they are doing so we aren’t bothered. I want others to change, but what I need is some quality that is missing from the relationship.

By way of example; some years back there was a guy in my Aggressive Offenders Program who was very clear that he didn’t need the program because he was no longer with the woman he assaulted. He was with someone new and things were great.

Then his new partner had a birthday, which he forgot, and things went south. He knew that what he needed was affection, and he had lots of that before he whiffed on her birthday, but he saw affection as something he got from her, not as something he could create in his relationship with her. What he wanted was for her to return to the relationship they once had, and once again give him the affection that he wanted. He was unable to see that the affection he needed was something he could create in the relationship by giving it to her by, for example, honoring her on her birthday. By creating what he needed those around him would get it too.

Three crucial observations:

• we create what the World needs by creating what we need;

• we have to be able to distinguish what we need from what we want; and

• we can best discern what we need by attending to what is bothering us. We are bothered when we don’t have what we need.

The pursuit of what we need is the aim for each of the Four Vectors.

1. The aim of Vector One is to move toward what we need in this moment.

2. For Vector Two the aim is to create the relationship between ourselves and the World which best supports what we need.

3. Vector Three arises in the context of who we know ourselves to uniquely be while doing what we are best equipped to do.

4. And Vector Four is our contribution to the aim of the organizations of which we are a part.

And each informs the others in the Braid of Meaning and Purpose.

I have now lived three quarters of a century. There are a good many things that I used to be able to do which I either don’t do as well or can’t do at all, but one thing I have always had a facility for, which now I am even better at, is pattern recognition. I can see an object or a series of events and recognize that I have seen it before and that there is a familiarity to it even as it has never happened before.

One of these patterns, which I have long noticed but am now seeing with what seems to me to be greater clarity, is the process by which we come to understand the meaning of our lives. Ideally this understanding will guide our actions as we seek to align with our unique purpose. While this is a many layered process, this shows up in the lives of my clients (I am a psychotherapist). I observe how important it is that we know that we matter, and that we have a reason for being and for doing, both for ourselves and for others.

My process for exploring a pattern like this one is to create a metaphor by which to describe it. It is a form of cognitive map which allows me to appreciate its complexity while diving deeper into its component parts. The phenomenon of our struggle to develop moral clarity as we live our complex lives appears to me to be like a braid.

In a previous post I showed an image of a loaf of bread (challah) made of four intertwined strands. Braided hair is may be a better metaphor. Each strand is itself made of many strands and each time the hair is braided it is formed uniquely. A hair that was in one strand yesterday may be in another today. To make a braid we need at least three strands (echoing Gurdjieff’s Law of Three) and what we typically think of for a hair braid. For this braid we need at least four strands to articulate the complexity of the problem. I am calling these strands vectors.

The “braid of meaning and purpose” is composed of four vectors. Each defines an aspect of our ability to be present in the world in a manner that affirms that we matter. Each arises from a perspective on who we understand ourselves to be in relation to who we are not. Thus this work is fundamentally about knowing who we are.

A vector is a geometric and mathematical figure that is one dimensional in space but formed of at least three components.

• There is the point from which the vector begins,

• there is the direction the vector aims, and

• there is the amplitude or intensity of the force moving from that point towards that aim.

In the largest sense this “braid of meaning and purpose” is something we form to give us resilience and to guide us in the decision-making process of daily living. It clarifies for us not just that we matter but why we matter. It gives us confidence that we are living our best lives in a manner that creates the best for all the world.

These four strands of the braid of meaning and purpose each arise from a core dimension of our lives.

• Vector One is centered in the personal or material realm.

• Vector Two arises from the social or relational or interpersonal realm.

• Vector Three depends upon an ability to listen deeply to ourselves in the interior or intrapersonal realm.

• And Vector Four seeks to address the aim of the whole system, the realm where everything is connected to everything, everywhere, all the time. This is the spiritual or transpersonal domain.

Vector One

Differentiation between the Four Vectors happens around the ways we construct our understanding of the relationship between the Self and the World. Vector One is the aspect of the braid of meaning and purpose that we construct in response to the World. It is how we define the relationship between the Self and that which is not-self. It is a core aspect of what we call individuation. Defining “who I am” is coming to clarity about who and what I am not. My task is to determine what I can do that will create what I need that is not dependent upon what the World may choose to do.

This means we start with how we understand ourselves and how who we are is distinct from the world around us. Fairly early in infancy we begin to observe that there is a difference between what is me and what is not me. We notice when we are teething that it feels different to bite down on our teething ring than to bite on our thumb. My thumb is me, my teething ring is not.

We are eagerly learning how to navigate the world… how to cross the street safely and to tie our shoes so they stay tied. We don’t consciously begin to solidify Vector One until we are in our early teens. At this point our brains are sufficiently developed that we can think about how we think. We will have already come to adopt moral ways of acting in the world. But it is only at this point that we start to see that we can adapt differently to different situations.

Vector Two

Vector Two is also formed early. We hold it out as distinct because it forms not from me but from the other. This vector is of the World telling us what and who we should be. This is the strand that is formed by what the World says about the nature of the Self. To be clear, this vector is not formed by what we are told to do or be by the other, but from what we make it mean that we are being told what we are told.

I recently saw a movie about a program for restorative justice in France. For a bit more than a decade now there has been a formal process by which the victims and perpetrators of violent crime can talk to each other. One format is that victims join incarcerated offenders in a conversation for a couple of hours each week for several weeks. They are not linked by the same crime but by a wish to understand each other. The central power of this process is that the participants come to be able to see how the others see them. Most powerfully from my perspective is that the offenders come to see the humanity of the victims and to understand that the harm they did was not simply about the possessions they stole. They caused innocent victims to be crippled by fear.

When the World tells the Self who we are supposed to be or how we are not creating what we intend, this informs who we believe ourselves to be and gives us clarity about why our choices matter, not just to ourselves, but to the World. I may not feel like I matter to me, but it is clear that I, by my choices, matter to others. I know that I matter because my choices powerfully affect others.

The result for the offenders in the restorative justice program was that they became notably more responsible. It is perhaps ironic that learning how their choices had harmed others allowed them to see themselves as having more worth. Their choices matter. They matter. It seems it is hard to know our worth without knowing how we have the power to harm others.

Vector Two is the strand of the braid that gives feedback and allows us to see ourselves with greater depth. But it can also lie to us about who we are. Some feedback is bogus and a projection of the World and not really about us. We have to grapple with the information and decide what is helpful and what is harmful.

I have a client who is struggling to believe that he matters. He is able to get a sense of worth from all that he does for his fiancé, but he is exhausted by that. Life seems to be more than he can master. He was sick as a child with some poorly defined maladies. His mom was overprotective of him and when things seemed too hard, she would step in and make sure that he was given special consideration so that he didn’t experience failure. By that he was told that he wasn’t able to do the normally hard things that others can do. This Vector Two message formed in him a Vector One conviction that he is not up to the challenges of life.

While Vector One is formed out of our ability to see a distinction between the Self and the World, Vector Two is formed by the engagement of the Self with the World. Having a well differentiated self is the ability to be connected to others while holding ourselves as separate from them. It is to be both bonded and bounded. Being well differentiated depends on having both a robust Vector One and a similarly robust Vector Two.

Knowing I am not like everyone else raises the question, who then am I? I know that there never has been nor will there ever be another me. I am a lot like others. I want to be acceptable and accepted. I want to fit in. But I also want to be authentic. This desire is the dawning of Vector Three.

Vector Three

If Vector One arises from distinctions between the Self and the World, and Vector Two from the engagement of the Self with the World, then Vector Three arises from the Self as separate from, or perhaps separable from, the World. My Vector One purpose is to make the choices that move me toward what I need in the World. My Vector Two purpose is to allow me to engage with the World such that I am creating the relationships which support me getting what I need. Thus my Vector Three purpose is to be in the World in a manner that expresses the unique nature of my being. My Vector Three purpose is to fulfill the aim that is only mine and which gives my life its core meaning.

That we each might have a unique and essential purpose is quite terrifying. There are a good many programs you can enroll in to support your ability to discern your personal and essential core purpose. The one with which I am the most familiar is Tim Kelley’s True Purpose Institute.

Tim is someone who had a deep sense that he had a life purpose but he struggled to discern what it was. In the process he became very clear about the obstacles to knowing one’s purpose. The central obstacle it seems is that we fear that if we know what our purpose is then we will have to live a different life than the one we want. But what we discover is that when we discern our life purpose we find great joy and fulfillment in living it out.

What do I do well? What gives me joy? What does the World need that I am in a position to create? What am I doing when I am in flow? We discover our Vector Three by deeply listening to ourselves. When we find it, and align with it, we discover how much we matter and how meaningful our lives can be.

Vector Four

Each of these vectors arises from and holds within it the prior vectors. Vector Two enhances Vector One by setting our personal choices in the context of our social world and our relationships with others. Vector Three grounds the prior two in the deep interior sense of what our lives are for. Vector Four then subsumes the priors into the larger context of creation itself. What is the point? Where is all of this going? What is the meaning of life?

There is a growing sense in the human community that evolution is real and has direction. We can align with this river and thrive, or we can oppose it and face extinction. One of the more hopeful articulators of this vision is Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit priest and paleontologist whose writings went mostly unpublished until after his death because they didn’t align with the teaching of the Catholic Church. His vision was that creation is moving from the geosphere and the biosphere to the noosphere, the latter being a rising of shared consciousness, a sort of planetary mind that is the next step in the evolution of the planet.

While Vector Four for you may include a vision for the future of the whole of creation, it will more likely be a sense of the aim of the various communities of which you are a part. What is the purpose of your marriage, of your family, of your nation. And how is it that your formative Vectors are in alignment with these larger aims?

I am often called upon to work with couples whose marriage is in trouble. Once madly in love they are now just mad. They have resentments that have built up, not been addressed fully so not resolved, and they are unsure whether they are going to stay together. If they are just nursing long-standing wounds and don’t know how to heal them, then I am confident that we can repair trust, recover affection, and restore a strong marriage.

But sometimes the problem is that they no longer want the same relationship. Maybe they never did, or maybe they no longer do. No two people want exactly what the other wants, but there has to be enough overlap in the Venn diagram that they are both committed to the relationship.

The aim of any system is constructed by the elements within it. When we are part of a complex adaptive system, like a marriage, the aim of the marriage is created by both of us. We will observe that, from time to time, the aim of the marriage and our Vector One don’t align. I may want to go fishing, but the kids have games this weekend.

At one level this may feel like the tension between Vectors One and Two. There is my personal aim and there is the aim that is formed by the expectations or wishes of others. But Vector Four is not about what I want, or what you want, but what we want. What have we collectively decided is the aim of the system which we are co-creating? And often the answer is, we don’t know.

This is why organizations and corporations have a mission statement. We have good research to show that one of the things that will make a system more resilient is for it to have a clear sense of its aim. This purpose ought to be understood and embraced by everyone in the group. But this hard to create in large part because we tend to create purpose statements that are overly broad and often use terms that are not well defined.

Another problem arises from the practice of making decisions within systems less about what we are trying to create than about how we are going to create it. The US has had a long-running debate about “healthcare.” But the conversation is mostly about what will be the structures by which we pay for it, not about what we are trying to create together. Do we want a system in which everyone’s health is attended to? That is an open question and that makes it impossible to achieve our aim. Not everyone wants everyone to get medical care.

Vector Four is thus the most problematic of the vectors. We create it as a larger system and find ourselves in many systems which have poorly defined aims or aims which are in conflict with each other. One of the most expansive and inclusive systems of which we are a part is the one we call God. Many people are unaware that they are actively creating the aim of this vector because they only see God as external to themselves. We don’t see that we are creating God by what we choose to worship.

For some God has as “His” aim the alignment of the world with the world “He” created 6,000 years ago. For some God is the source of evolution and delights in the diversity of all beings and is forever doing new things. Both groups seek to align with “the Will of God.” They just don’t agree on what that is.

A few years ago Rick Warren wrote a very popular book about what he termed “the purpose driven life.” In it he lays out broadly and deeply why knowing our purpose and living in alignment with it is so important to our personal and collective satisfaction. But he concludes his reflections with the assertion that we all have the same purpose, and he describes this purpose in language that reflects the theology of his own community. As he defines it, the aim of the Vector Four is just too particular to include most of the human community.

For the system which is the human community to come to clarity about the aim of life on this planet, there are some issues we will need to address. I can’t imagine an exhaustive list of these issues but I am sure of two of them. They are aspects of what we might think of as the Vector One of the noosphere. They are expressions of the tensions between uniformity and diversity and between hierarchy and holarchy.

I will return to this question in a couple of weeks. But for next week I want to look at the tensions which give strength to the Braid of Meaning and Purpose.

Many years ago I visited Dartmouth College and was down at the boathouse on the Connecticut River. There was someone there practicing with a kayak, capsizing it, and then righting it again by some trick of underwater paddle work. They did it over and over again. Each time with just a bit more confidence.

A few years back my wife and I bought kayaks and we took a course from a local store on how to best use them. If you are in a kayak and you turn over, there is no obvious way to right your boat. And you are upside down. In a still lake you can eject yourself from the boat and swim it to shore where you can dump the water out and get back in. But if you are in a fast moving river, your head is down there where the rocks are. If you can do the paddle trick you are far safer.

Part of the class was learning to do the paddle trick. I don’t remember what they call it, but I remember that I could never quite do it. I got close once. You are holding a paddle with a blade on either end and move it in a circular pattern while you also bend from the waist. I found it hard to do sitting upright. But it was nearly impossible when I was upside down in the water where… I couldn’t breathe.

There are certain things we can teach our bodies to do without thinking. This is part of the goal of martial arts training… to get to a point of unconscious competence… to naturally know what to do in any given situation.

In Japanese the term is Mushin. “Mushin no shin” means “Mind of no mind.” In Chinese martial arts (Kung Fu), the concept of Ziran (naturalness or spontaneity) is often emphasized. It suggests that through long-term practice, your movements should become as natural and unforced as breathing.

This is what the Dartmouth student was practicing. When the waves knock you over, you want righting yourself to be as natural as breathing.

Each of the four vectors is aligned with a different sphere of concern in our lives. We find that some arenas yield understanding of our purpose and meaning more easily than others. Nevertheless, the result we look for is to have each vector be as clear and accessible as the others and to have them in close cooperation with each other. The metaphor that arose for me here was of a braid with four roughly equal strands.

While looking for images of a four stranded braid I found bread in the form of challah, a good example in large part because of its ritual significance, and of braided hair, which is a valuable metaphor because most of us have braided hair at some point. But as I have been trying to learn to do a few of the more common ways to make a four strand braid it is a rope that seems most appropriate.

When we braid dough we are weaving together strands that are already fully formed and nearly symmetrical. Rope making on the other hand is a process by which the strands themselves are formed from yarn that is itself formed from fibers. The fibers in the yarn are twisted on one direction while the yarn that makes the strands are twisted in the opposite direction. And then the rope itself is braided to twist the strands in the opposite direction again. It is the tension created by the twisting that makes the rope strong.

Just so, there is a creative tension in the braid of meaning and purpose we form from the strands we are calling the Four Vectors.

And, when navigating the whitewater on the river of life, have as your life line a well-constructed rope. It should connect you to your confidence that you matter, clarify for you the meaning of your life, and then follow it to your purpose.

The Braid of Meaning and Purpose is a heuristic for finding a way of being in the world which maximizes our personal satisfaction as well as our benefit to others. The “braid” is composed of four strands or vectors. Each vector is a distinct mental construct by which we assess our aims and thus inform our actions. Each vector has as its origin our current experience of reality and points in the direction of the aim for each of four different systems, all of which show us that we matter.

Vector One is the first one we begin to form and it continues to guide us until our last breath. It’s aim is to help us make the choices which move us toward what we need.

Vector Two is also formed early in our lives and its aim is to guide us to create the best possible relationships with the social or relational contexts in which we find ourselves.

Vector Three arises as we discover that we are a unique being in the world and that we will best align with the first two vectors when we understand how we bring something to the world that no one else can.

Vector Four is the most complex as it is a composite of all of the aims of all of the systems of which we are a part. We are an element in friendships, marriage, family, workplace, nation, humanity and the community of sentient beings on this planet. As we are a part of these systems we construct the aim of the system by our aim within it.

Each of these vectors, when fully formed and held together in a strong braid, form our lifeline.

• Live in the present. That is where we can find reality.

• Suffering is unavoidable. Don’t wrestle with it.

• Better to have an ego than to let it have you.

• Live your meaning; don’t search for it.

All good stuff it seems to me. But there is an overtone to Oppong’s essay, which I think accurately reflects the teachings and the times in which these men have taught, but which suggests that we can find our place and stay in it. I am skeptical. I find I am always in tension with my intention to live my purpose.

In my post last week I suggested the analogy that we can maximize our efforts when we align with the current of the metaphorical river in which we find ourselves. When on a river like the Missouri, it is safe to be in the middle of the current. But these days we are riding white water. Going with the flow doesn’t seem like a good plan. The current will slam us into boulders and toss us over waterfalls.

So I am suggesting the Four Vectors as a heuristic by which to assess moment to moment where to aim the boat, and what our intentions should be in this tense time. But the navigation is tricky. While a vector is a one-dimensional object, we are moving in a multidimensional space. There are multiple interdependent variables. This is a truly complex problem as we seek to find our way in the chaos.

While there are a theoretically infinite number of variables, I want to try to simplify the problem a bit by noting four co-occurring dimensions. While not equally observed by us, I contend that they are each fully and completely present all the time everywhere.

The first is the material dimension. This is the one that is easiest to observe because it is the one we can all affirm as real. In this dimension we are persons with bodies and we are in a relationship with The World such that we know ourselves to be distinct. Early in life we form a “separate self-sense.” One thing on which we can all agree is that “I am not you.” What matters is matter.

The second is the relational dimension. All of the objects that arise for us in the material dimension are in relation to all other objects. And the relationship itself is a thing. We may have a friendship which is important to us but it is not itself a physical object. We used to think that money was an object, but now we can Venmo money to a friend without touching a coin, bill, or credit card. Law and language and culture are real, but not tangible.

The third is the interior dimension. This is the realm of our thoughts and feelings. Feelings are those things that are real to us, but which are unavailable to others until we share them. These are sensations, emotions, judgments, wishes, intuitions and imagination. They are the contents of a world that is ever-present to each of us, but unknown to all others. Indeed, there are objects in this dimension that are not available even to us. They are objects of which we are not conscious.

And the fourth is the universal dimension. This is the realm where everything is connected to everything, everywhere, all the time. This is the spiritual realm. This is the quantum realm when we recognize that quantum objects are simply perturbations in the matrix of being. They exist because we observe them. But this realm is not simply random. Its purpose is to be the formless from which form arises. It generates reality through the energy of love.

These dimensions are not separate from each other. We form them as mental objects in order to make sense of the complex dynamics of being, but it helps us to differentiate them from each other. We can think of the them as the personal, the interpersonal, the intrapersonal, and the transpersonal; or as the physical, the relational, the interior, and the spiritual.

Each is the central arena for one of the Four Vectors. Vector One is the aim for our choices in the material realm. We decide between options to determine which path will best move us toward what we need in our engagement with The World. We decide among options which will best take us toward what we need.

Vector Two arises as we discover our ability to engage with The World as a creative relationship. We find that we can be shaped by The World, and that our response to it can enhance our ability to create what we need as we get feedback about how we are experienced, as distinct from what we intend as the consequences of our choices.

Vector Three emerges from the dialectic between what The World is telling us we are to be and to do, and what our own interior tells us is a path that is more true to who we are. This is the vector of our own unique purpose by which we discern and create the greatest meaning for our lives.

Vector Four is revealed in the observation that we are not separate from The World. Our purpose is the purpose of The World. Our lives have meaning as we align with the current of history, evolution, and the emergence of consciousness. We are The World.

These four strands form our purpose in the world such that our lives have meaning. We braid them together like the dough that forms a 4-braid challah. They form a single loaf by which we feed The World.

I am calling them The 4 Vectors. “Vector” is a term from mathematics and it refers to a line that starts from a point and heads in a direction. Vectors can have qualities like magnitude and may be described numerically. For my purposes here I am thinking of a line the starts here and heads towards some goal with more or less intensity or integrity.

Each of the vectors starts from wherever we are at the moment. They each have a purpose or a goal. And they each have a greater or lesser sense of urgency or intensity. Collectively they inform the decisions we make as we live our lives, as we follow on the pilgrimage.

Vector One is defined by what we most need in the moment. It is what we calculate to be the thing that will best define and create what we need.

Vector Two is defined by what we observe that we are actually doing. It is an objective calculation of where our choices are leading us.

Vector Three is defined by what we understand to be our larger purpose. It is informed by our abilities and our interests but also by what we see as the needs of The World.

Vector Four is defined by what we discern to be the direction that history, humanity, creation, and evolution is taking. It is the purpose of being in the largest sense we can grasp. It is defined by wisest of those among us, be they the sages of old, the native elders, or the philosophical or theological giants of our time.

Over the next few weeks we are going to explore each of these vectors. As we do so we will be noting that each of them arises as a source of guidance within all four dimensions of being; the material or personal, the relational or inter-personal, the interior or intra-personal, and the spiritual or transpersonal.

And we will note that in addition to our work to discern the direction and magnitude of each of these vectors, we also need to bring them into alignment. We want to orient to them such that each of the vectors reinforce the others. In that regard, I want to share a reflection I wrote last summer.

One of the many sources of privilege in my life was the Scout troop of my boyhood. It served as a primary source of my early formation. My troop had some form of outdoor adventure every month. We camped and canoed in the areas around Kansas City.

Mostly we canoed the rivers of the Ozarks, but one time we ventured out on the Missouri River. The Missouri and the Kansas rivers combine at Kansas City. We put in somewhere just downstream of the confluence. This was a very different river to float.

On an Ozark stream the goal is to not hit the rocks or run aground. The Missouri was more like being on a lake. There was lots of room, nothing to run into, and mostly the water seemed pretty still.

As boys will be, we were somewhat competitive. We were in a subtle race to get to the take out point some miles downstream. We set a direct course and we paddled hard.

With us on the float was a man we hadn’t met. He brought his own one-person canoe. He was a friend of one of the leaders and he wasn’t introduced, but he joined us on the journey. The Scout leaders were each in a canoe with one of younger boys. The rest of us were paired to have roughly equal strength and experience. But this one solitary stranger was by himself.

He clearly knew what he was doing. His stroke was strong and steady, at ease and confident. But he wandered all over the river. Sometimes on the left of us and sometimes on the right of us but always confident. And despite the hard effort we were making to move ourselves through the still water on the river, he was moving downstream faster than we were.

Our assumption was that the fastest route is the shortest distance. The shortest distance with the most effort will get us to the goal the soonest. But here he was all by himself, not working very hard, and wandering all over the river, and he was smoking us.

I know I didn’t figure it out that day, but at some point I realized that he was charting a different path, just staying in the middle of the current. He was letting the river do the work. His work was to align himself with the river… with the flow. He trusted and went with the river. We were fighting it.

This experience came to mind for me recently when I read a post about how a clear sense of our purpose does not come from working hard, but by aligning with the currents of our life. We hear some voices telling us to be ambitious and to work hard. This isn’t bad advice, but we can paddle really hard and not get to the goal. Our purpose is not just chosen by us, it is disclosed to us. We merely have to see it and align ourselves with it.

Just so we will work to align the vectors with each other

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These first three conversations we have planned will look at concerns named by the More In Common report called Beyond MAGA. This report noted that there are within the Trump voter coalition different types which are in many ways distinct. They also state that “these divisions within the Trump voter coalition exist alongside striking agreement: America is in crisis, the political establishment has failed, and the other side holds them in contempt.” I have noted that these sentiments are not limited to Trump voters but are widely shared. I have summarized them as concerns about chaos, corruption, and contempt and have elevated them as the topics for this first series of conversations.

I want to offer here some of my thoughts about chaos in an effort to spark your own thinking about what you will bring to the conversation.

• In most creation myths, including those in the book of Genesis in the Bible, the undifferentiated matrix out of which Creation arises is Chaos. A symbol for chaos is a large body of water, ocean or lake, like the sea into which Jonah was cast and from which he was saved by a large fish, and the water over which Peter walked toward Jesus as Jesus strode toward the disciples on the Sea of Galilee.

• One of the themes in the continually arising science of complexity is of the nature of chaos. When we explore the hidden properties of chaos we discover fractals and other patterns which we can also see in the natural world as with the unfolding of a fern frond.

• In the hierarchy of the ways we construct meaning in our lives we can see that some cognitive maps are simple, and some are complicated, but that more and more we seem to need to see the inherent complexity of being as our experience approaches chaos.

• In the study of the dynamics of complex systems we can observe that such systems gain energy and discover new modes of self-organization as they adapt to the edge of chaos. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_of_chaos]

• In the course of our daily lives we seek to create routines and rituals that allow us to do what needs to be done with a minimum of effort and the confidence that we will create the desired outcomes. But when the things that used to work don’t anymore, because we can’t do what we used to do, or when outside forces disrupt our routine, we experience chaos.

• When institutions that we have depended on change how they operate such that we no longer have confidence about their ability to create what we need, we experience chaos.

Bring whatever arises for you and join us for the April conversation on Guideposts. Online conversation will be on Wednesday, April 1 and the in person conversation will be on Friday, April 17th. Each starts at 7:00 PM Central time.

To register for the online event, go to the Doodle poll here, and for the in person event go here.

True Patriots were the ones who challenged the overreach of the king and dumped the tea in the harbor. The Tories celebrated the King and had armed agents patrolling the streets and impeding daily lives and commerce.

The contemporary equivalent of the Tories are called MAGA.

These first three conversations we have planned will look at concerns named by the More In Common report called Beyond MAGA. This report noted that there are within the Trump voter coalition different types which are in many ways distinct. They also state that “these divisions within the Trump voter coalition exist alongside striking agreement: America is in crisis, the political establishment has failed, and the other side holds them in contempt.” I have noted that these sentiments are not limited to Trump voters but are widely shared. I have summarized them as concerns about chaos, corruption, and contempt and have elevated them as the topics for this first series of conversations.

I want to offer here some of my thoughts about chaos in an effort to spark your own thinking about what you will bring to the conversation.

• In most creation myths, including those in the book of Genesis in the Bible, the undifferentiated matrix out of which Creation arises is Chaos. A symbol for chaos is a large body of water, ocean or lake, like the sea into which Jonah was cast and from which he was saved by a large fish, and the water over which Peter walked toward Jesus as Jesus strode toward the disciples on the Sea of Galilee.

• One of the themes in the continually arising science of complexity is of the nature of chaos. When we explore the hidden properties of chaos we discover fractals and other patterns which we can also see in the natural world as with the unfolding of a fern frond.

• In the hierarchy of the ways we construct meaning in our lives we can see that some cognitive maps are simple, and some are complicated, but that more and more we seem to need to see the inherent complexity of being as our experience approaches chaos.

• In the study of the dynamics of complex systems we can observe that such systems gain energy and discover new modes of self-organization as they adapt to the edge of chaos. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_of_chaos]

• In the course of our daily lives we seek to create routines and rituals that allow us to do what needs to be done with a minimum of effort and the confidence that we will create the desired outcomes. But when the things that used to work don’t anymore, because we can’t do what we used to do, or when outside forces disrupt our routine, we experience chaos.

• When institutions that we have depended on change how they operate such that we no longer have confidence about their ability to create what we need, we experience chaos.

Bring whatever arises for you and join us for the April conversation on Guideposts. Online conversation will be on Wednesday, April 1 and the in person conversation will be on Friday, April 17th. Each starts at 7:00 PM Central time.

To register for the online event, go to the Doodle poll here, and for the in person event go here.

You are in a conversation with a small group of people. More people than are usually in a conversation, but not so many that you can’t know everyone’s name. You are talking about something that matters to you. The topic is something that you and everyone else in the room sees as, in some sense, urgent. When you speak about this topic, everyone listens. Everyone is eager to hear what you have to say. No one is trying to change your mind or to diminish your perspective. The only challenge you feel is to be more and more clear about what you mean, and what you experience, and what you intend to do.

This is a Guidepost conversation. It is a marker on the pilgrimage of life. This is a waypoint on the human journey where we check-in with each other about what we know about where we are, where we hope to get to, and what we intend to do to get there. We are not certain about our answers to these questions. But we believe that we will all do better if we each do better.

We are just a couple of weeks away from the first of these scheduled conversations. For more information about them, and to register if you want to attend, follow this link.

Conversations can be transformational: There is a common attitude that talk is cheap and that talking doesn’t change anything. Nevertheless, the thing we most need to change is how we think. Our thinking is allowed to develop and expand when we are exposed to those who think differently. If we change our thinking, we change our actions. If we change our actions, we change the world.

Intimacy expands the power of conversation: The more emotionally connected we are, the more we can allow ourselves to be vulnerable, and the more the other can impact us. Intimacy depends on safety. We will not allow intimacy in the context of relationships in which we are afraid. Having a clear and consistent structure for the conversation allows for greater safety.

Collecting new perspectives: Transformation arises from the access we gain to novel ways of making meaning. The more perspectives we have on a given topic, the more we become able to see it with depth. That others see the thing we are addressing differently than we do gives us more vantage points with which to address it.

Urgent Issues: We are most likely to experience these ways of thinking when in conversation with those who care deeply about what we care about. When we share a sense of urgency with others, there is a greater likelihood that we will experience intersubjectivity. This collective sense holds the conversation and its consequences in a shared way of being that can influence society.

Keeping the lens in focus: If the conversation is with more than three people it can become segmented into multiple conversations. To protect against that, there must be a structure that holds the attention of the participants to a single focus. A tested way to do this is with the use of a “talking piece.” Only the one holding the talking piece is authorized to speak.

The design of Guideposts constructs conversations which are intimate, reveal novel perspectives, and are urgent and focused.

Each Guidepost has a clearly defined topic which everyone in attendance wishes to address. Each has a trained facilitator who is responsible for the structure and process of the event, but who does not direct the flow of the conversation. Some are in-person and some on-line.

Each iteration of the process informs the events to come by gathering information about what works and what doesn’t. This is an evolving technology.

The first events will be in April, May and June of 2026. Online events will be on the first Wednesday of each month on Zoom, and the in-person events will be on the third Friday at the office of the Center for Creative Conflict Resolution in St. Louis.

These events will address topics raised by the group More in Common and named here as chaos, corruption, and contempt.

Chaos: Online April 1, In-person April 17:

There are a great number of things in the news and the public concern that give a sense of growing chaos. Climate change, political polarization, human migration, impact of social media and of artificial intelligence… Society is changing more rapidly than most of us can keep up. How are you impacted by this disorder? What do you see as the most fundamental cause? What do you imagine will create a more stable order and what can you do to support the creation of that order?

Corruption: Online May 6, In-person May 15:

One source of the chaos is the disruption of formerly stable social structures that are now collapsing because of some sort of corruption. While the legal definition is rather narrow, what do you mean by corruption, how does it impact you, and what is your sense of what we need to do as a community to address it?

Contempt: Online June 3, In-person June 19:

No matter how you define your position in human society, there are those who express contempt for you. You cannot take a stand on social media without someone belittling you. You cannot hold a political conviction or choose to be politically neutral without there being someone who finds your stance to be reprehensible. How and when do you experience the contempt of others? Who do you have contempt for? What are the consequences of this cultural climate and what might we do about it?

To sign up for any of these Guideposts, register here for in person, and here for on-line.

Guidelines for the conversations can be found here.

There is a common structure for the Guideposts which can be found here.

We are so deeply divided that we can look at a video taken on the streets of Minneapolis and come to diametrically opposed conclusions. [https://markleerobinson.substack.com/p/maybe-they-arent-lying]

While there are many efforts in place to create conversations between those holding opposite worldviews, and good things come from those conversations, those are not the conversations we must foster to create a fulsome response to authoritarianism. We need conversations among those who experience each other as allies working toward shared aims. [https://markleerobinson.substack.com/p/what-are-they-thinking]

Social structures like autocracy and democracy are hyper-objects that are not constrained by space and time and thus resist efforts to deconstruct them. Rather than tearing down that which we see as harmful, we do better to create that which is good. [https://markleerobinson.substack.com/p/what-is-a-hyper-object]

Moving toward what is good… what we all need… is difficult in these turbulent times and so we need a strong moral gyroscope with firm angular momentum. [https://markleerobinson.substack.com/p/how-we-move-toward-what-we-need]

We may have doubts that we are sufficient to the task. We may not know how powerful we are. We must come to appreciate the empowerment which comes from knowing what we need and being willing to join with others to create it. [https://markleerobinson.substack.com/p/you-matter-be-powerful]

Having introduced the metaphors of hyper-objects and moral gyroscopes, I want to add another: a chrysalis for mutuality, accountability, and love.

At some point in grade school I learned in science class about how a caterpillar becomes a butterfly. Somehow the worm makes a capsule out of which a beautiful being emerges. I think I saw this as a magical change of the wardrobe a bit like Clark Kent getting into the phone booth and Superman coming out.

Somewhat later I learned that, after the caterpillar forms the chrysalis, its body dissolves into a mass of goo, and that it is out of that mass that the butterfly creates itself. It is not one organ system becoming a slightly different one, it is the caterpillar giving itself so that the butterfly can become.

But even more recently I have learned that the differentiations of the caterpillar do not completely dissolve. There are certain tiny structures, not more than a few dozen cells, which form what are called imaginal discs. These provide some sort of template for the formation of the resulting butterfly.

The human community is approaching a crisis point. There is a wish we share that we can simply improve the functioning of certain systems and we can thereby minimize the dislocations that are coming. We just need to cap carbon emissions, and write a better code for AI, and renegotiate a new arms treaty. We do what we used to do… we just do it better.

But it may be that the old is forming a chrysalis from which the new will emerge. Perhaps our work is less about using more efficient light bulbs and more about designing and living into new ways of forming human community. Maybe the best we can do is to discover and create the imaginal discs from which humanity can construct a new way of being.

Constructing clarity about what these new ways of being might be like is not something that an individual can do. This can only be the product of a community effort. We need to host conversations in which we can discern and begin to live into the evolution of humanity on planet Earth.

We may think of this conversation as a kind of chrysalis by which humanity is transformed. The question then is, what can we know about how to begin this transformative conversation? How must the conversation be structured, what will be its process, and what is the aim?

Imagine that you are one of nearly a dozen people who have agreed to meet for a structured conversation about something that all are troubled by. As each person registered for the event they were given a statement of the aims, so you know this is something everyone is taking seriously. You have gathered in a comfortable living room space, and casually met the other participants. Then the facilitator announces it is time to start. You sit in a circle and the facilitator begins by describing the issue for this iteration of the conversation. This evening it is the disorder… the chaos… that seems to be impairing some of our vital institutions.

“We have gathered this evening to address together the concern we all have for the ways we see important structures in the larger community to be crumbling. We are each aware of and care about different institutions, but we can see a larger pattern of the loss of social cohesion.

• Police don’t make us feel safe.

• We have proximity to the best healthcare in the world but accessing it may cause bankruptcy.

• We don’t get the sense of spiritual grounding from religious institutions that we think our grandparents did.

• Formerly protected rights as to abortion, gender affirming care, or even freedom to travel are being erased or eroded.

• We are alarmed that our political parties are more concerned with having power than with enhancing the general welfare.

…and so on.

“We are here to have a structured conversation for the purpose of naming our common concerns while appreciating the different perspectives and experiences we bring to this set of issues. Our aim is to give voice to our anxiety while honoring our differences.”

The facilitator then explains the process for the conversation. Only one person speaks at a time. There will be a series of rounds, each with slightly different aims and rules, but all for the purpose of clarity and cohesion. Everyone gets a chance to speak but no one has to speak. It is perfectly acceptable to “pass.” The rounds each address a different aspect of the topic.

• Why this matters: How does this topic affect your life? Why is this important to you?

• What story do you tell yourself: What sense does this make to you? How do you explain it?

• How are you harmed: What can you say about the harm that is being done to you?

• What do you imagine you might do: Can you define the problem in a manner that allows you to do something to address the problem?

The final round starts about 15 minutes before the end of the conversation. Each participant who chooses to gets two minutes to say what they have learned about the issue, ideas that have come to them about how they might address it, and what they have learned about themselves.

Is this a conversation you might want to participate in?

By next week I hope to have a fuller description of the conversation and options to join it.

What I am going to suggest we do is to have a conversation. This is a very specific kind of conversation and it is enough like other conversations that I fear you will dismiss my suggestion as something that you have heard before. So I started by saying that a conversation with those who most disagree with you is not a good place to start because it is unlikely that you will come to clarity about what you both want. While there is great benefit to being able to see from the other’s point of view, if you don’t share the same aim you won’t be able to work together.

And then I suggested that the purpose of the conversation is less to get the other to change than to change ourselves. The change I am proposing is one in which we find our own moral gyroscope to be energized so as to create the angular momentum to set a course and keep to it, even as we are buffeted by the events of the day.

And I am intending to move on to the structure and process of the conversation I propose, but I find myself worried that you may feel as though you won’t be able to make a big enough difference to warrant the effort it will take. I am worried that you may not know that you matter.

In the largest sense, most of us know that everything and everyone matters. But in a more immediate sense, most of us fear that we don’t matter. And it is vital for the wellbeing of all that everyone knows that they and the actions they take matter. Indeed, those who think that what they do doesn’t matter can be quite dangerous.

Having spent much of my career working to help heal people who have done harmful things, I know that one of the central issues that informs how we show up in our relationships with each other is the question of how we use the power we each have. The question can be framed, “Do I have power and what is the evidence of that?”

From the perspective of Newton’s Laws of Motion, power is the ability to do work and work is a product of how much effort it takes to make something change. If nothing changes, no work was done, and you have no power.

But from the perspective of our observations about our relationship to the world, we don’t necessarily know what difference our actions have made. We know from the science of complexity and the nature of chaotic systems that small differences in initial conditions can have a huge impact on the outcome of the system [the butterfly effect], but since we don’t know, we tend to assume that we didn’t have an impact. Or we may notice that we didn’t have the impact we intended. Or we may be afraid of our power because we fear doing harm. Thus we don’t trust that we are powerful.

When we think about power, we generally mean power over. This is the power we have to make something external to ourselves change. When I get the lid off the pickle jar, I have power over the lid. When I can’t, I feel frustrated and powerless.

But there is also power with. This is the power we have when we ally with others to create what we all want. When I know that I can’t move the couch by myself and so I ask for your help, you and I move the couch and do together what neither of us could have done by ourselves. Power with is more powerful than power over.

But when you and I move the couch, I will probably note that I couldn’t have done it by myself and thus it is not evidence of my power. In our culture, it is only power over that we acknowledge. Power with is just evidence of my lack of power. I couldn’t do it without you. And so we tend to minimize the power that is greater.

But there is a greater power still. That is empowerment. This is the power that we each have to create what we need only by changing ourselves. This power comes from knowing that we matter. We notice what is not working for us, identify the need that is not being met, and act to create that quality in our lives.

Let us look at how these three kinds of power are playing out in Minneapolis right now.

The federal officers from ICE and CBP are exercising power over. They have flooded the streets with a presence that is aimed at intimidating the public. They claim to do this so that they can sweep up people they believe they can deport, but the more fundamental aim is to intimidate, and, if possible, provoke a violent reaction. Because they don’t have legitimate power, they resort to actions in which many officers work together to confront those who are protesting their presence and practices. Because their power over is not based on the law… which is a form of power with… they assemble shows of power with other officers.

In response, the people of Minneapolis have undertaken to protect themselves and each other by what Adam Serwer has identified as three different levels of activity. There are those who participate in planned protests at specific sites and times. There are those who gather wherever the federal agents are active to visibly show the officers that they are themselves being watched and resisted. And there are those who with little visibility are reaching out to their fellow residents to give them food and transportation and emotional support. Let’s call them the protesters, the watchers, and the caregivers.

The protesters are the most visible because they are in great numbers at times and in places where they can be seen. They are primarily engaged in power with as they work in coordination with each other. By their number and visibility they are protecting each other from the power over of the federal agents.

The watchers tend to be most visible to the agents and thus are the most at risk. They are drawn to the actions by which the agents express power over and thus are seen as responding by their own attempts to have power over. This reaction might be seen as a personal confrontation so Renee Good assured Jonathan Ross that she was not mad at him. Moments later he shot her three times, killing her, in the ultimate act of power over. Alex Pretti was also a watcher.

The caregivers are the least visible. They express themselves by acting on behalf of others. They are expressing empowerment. They need a community in which everyone cares for everyone and so they are creating what they need by acting on behalf of others.

Because this is the safest and least visible we may make the mistake of thinking this is the least powerful. We would be wrong. It is just this sort of care-giving that creates the social fabric that allows and supports the protesters and the watchers. To even know when and where a protest will be requires that caregivers are sharing information. To have the courage to be a watcher, one needs to know that the community has one’s back.

Now, I know that you may not be quick to affirm my argument here, so I want to state it as plainly as possible. We tend to think of ourselves as powerless when we aren’t in a position to exert power over others. Getting others to do what we want is what is commonly meant by power. And if I don’t have power, then what I do doesn’t matter… indeed, I don’t matter. This is dangerously false.

The ways we engage with those around us creates the social fabric on which we all depend. We don’t see this as a expression of power because it is not dependent upon each of us alone. It depends on all of us together.

When we are all creating the same thing, we are in harmony with each other. But when what we are creating is a society in which power is aggregated into dominance hierarchies, the harmony is also acquiescing to oppression. So at points we are going push back. We can do this is multiple ways. And one of the most powerful is also the safest but least visible. This is when we discover times when being in harmony is not creating what we need, and that there are ways of acting that not only create what we need, they create what the system as a whole needs. We shelter and feed each other.

Thus, the greatest power does not come from power over. That power frays the social fabric. Power with builds and strengthens the social fabric. It creates mutually accountable relationships. It affirms the diversity of the community and appreciates that our differences are a source of energy that enhances the angular momentum of our moral gyroscope. And, for us to each be able to bring our unique selves to the human experience we must be ourselves empowered.

[For more about the difference between what we want and what we need, check out this post.]

Next: how do we create the container for conversations which increase the angular momentum of our moral gyroscope?

It may be that there were simpler times when a compass was sufficient to guide our decisions and behavior. There may have been times when a challenge to our hegemony by a willful child could be met with, “because I am the parent and I say so.” But as they grow and their circumstances change the developing complexity of our relationship will necessitate more nuance. We will need to take into account more points of reference while keeping our bearings.

I invite you to check in with yourself and see if you don’t already have a moral gyroscope. It helps you know who you are and what you have as your aim as you seek to clarify what it is that you will do. It keeps you grounded even as it sets your direction and allows you to better choose from multiple options about what you are about to do.

And if you can find your moral gyroscope, do you notice that it is more available at some points than it is at others? Sometimes the course is clear and what we must do is obvious. But at other points the path ahead is obscured, or there are too many options. We make seek the guidance of others or we may notice we have access to prior guidance. We may hear someone we have trusted whispering in our thoughts reminding us of wisdom shared.

My car has a feature called Lane Keep Assist. When it is on, and I start to drift out of my lane without turning on my turn signal, the steering wheel will shake just a bit. It is my car reminding me to be careful. This physical signal from a “smart” tool is called haptic feedback. At times when we have a robust moral gyroscope and we are confronted with a complex decision we may experience a sort of interior haptic feedback reminding us to pay attention and even suggesting what we might now best do to move toward what we and the world around us needs.

This feedback system is something that we form to keep us from straying off course. It is created to keep us safe. But sometimes the circumstances that created the embodied alarm that alerts us to danger was formed in a crucible of trauma. Sometimes the result is that we react too much or too little. Sometimes the feedback is amplified and sometimes it is muted.

When we “do our work” the result is not that we lose the haptic feedback, but that we understand where it is coming from and we adjust for it. Just so, with a compass we know that true north is a few degrees off of magnetic north.

We may learn about ourselves that the level of alarm we are in at the moment is a consequence of that horrible day back in kindergarten. Thus, in order to maintain robust functioning of our interior moral gyroscope we must have shields that dampen certain emotional and relational shocks. We will have to protect the integrity of our moral gyroscope. We may need to learn which life events will cause our gimbals to clog and not allow for the free movement needed to keep ourselves grounded and centered.

But too much protection and our gyroscope becomes like a toy top we cherish and put in a box on a shelf. It loses energy. It doesn’t spin and no longer creates the angular momentum that is its essential purpose. It is the angular momentum that keeps the gyroscope in alignment.

At some point you may have had occasion to hold a wheel by its axle. I have done this when repairing a bicycle. If you hold a single wheel in front of you with a hand on each side of the axle, you will be able to turn the wheel any way you want. But if you have someone spin the wheel you discover that it resists changing its orientation. I wants to stay in alignment. This is what allows you to remain upright on a bicycle once you have it moving. When you stop at the corner, you will fall over. In the case of our inner moral gyroscope, the angular momentum is increased by the energy of those around us. We resonate with those around us which causes the wheel to spin faster.

This is not only true with morality. If you are into sports, you want to hang out with other sports fans. This is why people want to see the game live even though you can see it better on TV. The energy of the fans in the stadium is intense. So, we can increase the angular momentum of our inner moral gyroscope by being with others who have moral concerns and engage them in ways that heighten our awareness.

The easiest way to do this is to be part of a community that has clear and uniform standards of morality. It is pretty easy to have moral certainty if we are allied with others who see things just as we do. However, there is a problem with having uniformity of thought in any community. If you hang out with other sports fans who see the game and the players and the teams just as you do, harmony is easy but the conversation is boring. We need diversity to build energy.

In the case of building angular momentum for making our own moral gyroscope more robust, it is best if we are in conversations with others who care about the same issues-- that is, they share similar values-- but who see them differently--that is, they hold different perspectives. It is the friction between viewpoints that gets the wheel spinning faster. Or maybe it works better to think of it as giving the wheel greater heft. It gives our moral gyroscope mass which results in us feeling more grounded and gives us more intense haptic feedback.

In the next post I am going to look at how we might design conversations with others who share our values but perhaps not our perspectives. We want to be sure we have similar aims but still have diverse worldviews.

Wednesday afternoon I was starting to read Jeremy Johnson’s Seeing Through the World: Jean Gebser and Integral Consciousness and I came across a reference to Tim Morton’s idea of a hyper-object. I could get a sense of what that is from the context, but it seemed important to understand it more fully, so I decided to ask AI about it.

Just yesterday a friend mentioned that Claude of Anthropic now has a Constitution. I was reading about it and thought I should try it someday. And then I thought, why not today? So, I created a free account with Claude and asked him the question.

I was stunned by the result. While I was at no point under the impression that I was engaged with anything other than a very powerful machine, I could not have imagined how deeply and how quickly this collaboration unfolded. Claude may not be a person, but he is certainly a partner.

Here is the conversation.

What is a hyper-object?

4:48 PM

A hyperobject is a concept developed by philosopher Timothy Morton to describe things that are so massively distributed in time and space that they transcend localized human perception and experience.

The key characteristics of hyperobjects include:

Viscosity - They “stick” to us and we can’t shake them off. We’re entangled with them whether we like it or not.

Nonlocality - They’re so vast that we can only perceive local manifestations of them, never the whole thing at once. You might experience a heat wave or a flood, but not “climate change” itself.

Temporal undulation - They exist across timescales that dwarf human lifespans, appearing and disappearing from our awareness.

Phasing - They occupy a higher-dimensional space than we’re used to thinking about, so we only see “slices” of them.

Interobjective - They’re formed by relations between other objects rather than being simple, unified things.

Classic examples include global warming, radioactive materials (like plutonium with its 24,000-year half-life), the internet, or capitalism - phenomena so distributed and interconnected that we experience their effects everywhere but can never directly perceive the whole.

Morton introduced this concept to help us think about ecological and environmental challenges that resist traditional modes of understanding because of their enormous scale. The idea is that hyperobjects force us to reckon with the limits of human-centered thinking.

Is democracy a hyper-object?

4:50 PM

That’s a fascinating question that gets at something important about how democracy functions.

Democracy could be considered a hyperobject in several ways:

Scale and distribution - No one experiences “democracy” as a whole. You experience voting at a polling station, a town hall meeting, a protest, a court ruling, or a legislative debate - but these are all just local manifestations of a vastly distributed system of practices, institutions, and relationships spanning millions of people and generations.

Temporal extension - Democracy exists across timescales beyond individual lives. Constitutional frameworks, evolving norms, institutional memories, and precedents stretch back centuries and project forward indefinitely. A single vote today connects to struggles and decisions from long before you were born.

Viscosity - Whether you participate or not, you’re entangled in democratic systems. They shape your rights, obligations, opportunities, and constraints. You can’t simply opt out.

Interobjective nature - Democracy isn’t a single thing but emerges from relations between laws, institutions, people, traditions, technologies, economic structures, and cultural practices.

However, there’s a counterargument: unlike climate change or radioactive waste, democracy is fundamentally a human construction that could theoretically be dismantled or transformed through collective action. It’s massively distributed but perhaps not quite as radically beyond human grasp as Morton’s original examples.

The hyperobject lens might be most useful for understanding why democracy often feels so difficult to fix or protect - you can’t just “see” it or touch it directly, only wrestle with its endless local manifestations.

So, democracy as a form of governance may not be a hyper-object, but how about society or culture? Do they rise to the level of a hyper-object?

4:53 PM

Now you’re really probing the boundaries of the concept in productive ways.

Society and culture seem even stronger candidates for hyperobjects than democracy:

Nonlocality at its extreme - You never encounter “society” or “culture” directly, only specific interactions, artifacts, norms, or practices. A conversation with a neighbor, a wedding ceremony, a legal transaction, a TikTok trend - these are all just tiny surface manifestations of incomprehensibly vast networks of meaning and relationship.

Viscosity taken to the limit - You can’t step outside culture or society. Even your attempts to reject or critique them are made using tools, concepts, and languages that culture provides. You’re thoroughly saturated in them from birth.

Massive temporal undulation - Cultural patterns and social structures stretch back millennia and forward indefinitely. Language itself, kinship systems, religious frameworks, economic relations - all operating on timescales that dwarf individual lives while constantly phasing in and out of visibility.

Interobjective to the core - Society and culture are nothing but relations between people, ideas, objects, practices, and institutions. There’s no “thing” there apart from this web of connections.

However, there’s an interesting wrinkle: Morton developed hyperobjects specifically to describe phenomena that humans couldn’t easily think ourselves out of - things that resisted anthropocentric frameworks. Society and culture are deeply anthropogenic - made by humans - even if no individual or group controls them.

But maybe that’s precisely the point: even our own collective creations can become so vast and distributed that they take on hyperobject-like qualities, confronting us with the limits of human intentionality and control.

Well, humans don’t create radioactivity, but climate change, the internet, capitalism are certainly human-made artifacts.

4:57 PM

You’re absolutely right - I overstated that distinction. Thank you for the correction.

Climate change, the internet, and capitalism are all Morton’s own examples of hyperobjects, and they’re entirely human-created. So the anthropogenic nature of something doesn’t disqualify it from being a hyperobject at all.

What seems to matter more is that scale and complexity, whether human-made or not. Once something becomes sufficiently distributed across space and time, and sufficiently entangled with everything else, it takes on these hyperobject qualities - becoming impossible to perceive as a whole, impossible to escape, and resistant to straightforward human intervention even if humans created it.

So yes, society and culture absolutely fit the hyperobject framework. They’re human creations that have grown so vast, distributed, and self-perpetuating that no individual or group can grasp them entirely or control them directly. Like capitalism or the internet, they emerge from human activity but exceed human intention and comprehension.

The key insight might be that hyperobjects reveal how even our own creations can become radically other to us - how we can make things that then trap us, exceed us, or confront us with our own limits. That’s arguably Morton’s central point about the Anthropocene: humans have created planetary-scale systems that now dwarf our ability to manage them.

Thanks for pushing back on that - it sharpened the concept considerably.

So, this suggests that there are hyper-objects that are created by human interaction but that humans cannot now alter them.

4:59 PM

Exactly - and that’s a rather unsettling realization.

It suggests a kind of one-way door: humans can create hyperobjects through our collective actions, but once they reach a certain threshold of scale and complexity, they become effectively unalterable, at least not through direct, intentional intervention.

Climate change is the paradigmatic example - we created it through industrialization, but now we can’t simply “uncreate” it. We’re locked into certain warming trajectories regardless of what we do today. The CO2 already in the atmosphere will persist for centuries.

This challenges some fundamental assumptions:

The Enlightenment idea that what humans make, humans can unmake or control. The notion that increased knowledge leads to increased mastery. The belief that collective action can solve collective problems in straightforward ways.

But there are important nuances:

“Cannot alter” might be too strong - perhaps it’s more like “cannot alter in predictable, controlled, or reversible ways.” We can still affect these hyperobjects, just not master them. We can mitigate climate change even if we can’t reverse it. We can shape capitalism’s evolution even if we can’t simply abolish it.

And maybe the time horizons matter - what’s unalterable on human timescales might still be alterable on the multi-generational or geological timescales where hyperobjects actually exist.

Still, your point stands: we’ve created things that now exceed our control. That’s both a philosophical puzzle and a practical crisis.

It may then be that trying to deconstruct a potent hyper-object is a fool’s errand. But perhaps we can intentionally create new hyper-objects which can ameliorate the more harmful effects.

5:01 PM

Now that’s a genuinely provocative and potentially profound strategic insight.

The logic is compelling: If hyperobjects resist direct deconstruction but emerge from distributed human activity, then perhaps the way to address harmful hyperobjects isn’t to attack them head-on but to cultivate competing or counterbalancing hyperobjects that can interact with them at the same scale.

Some possible examples of this strategy already underway:

Renewable energy infrastructure - Not just replacing fossil fuels piecemeal, but building an entirely new distributed system of generation, storage, and transmission that could eventually become its own self-perpetuating hyperobject, rivaling the fossil fuel economy.

Open-source software ecosystems - Creating massively distributed collaborative systems that operate according to different logics than proprietary capitalism, potentially reshaping how digital infrastructure works.

Global scientific collaboration networks - Building hyperobjects of knowledge-sharing and collective research that can grapple with hyperobject-scale problems.

The strategic advantage: You’re working with the grain of how hyperobjects form - through distributed, emergent, relational processes - rather than trying to impose top-down control.

The risk: Unintended consequences at hyperobject scale. You might create something that addresses one problem but generates new ones, and once it reaches critical mass, you can’t easily course-correct.

But perhaps that’s the best we can do - not control or master these vast systems, but participate more consciously in the ongoing process of their emergence and interaction. It’s humble and ambitious at the same time.

It seems to me that all the examples you list, and it is a great list, share certain common features. The one that stands out most for me is that they build upon distributed decision-making and eschew dominance hierarchies.

5:04 PM

You’ve identified something crucial - and it suggests these aren’t just random examples but manifestations of a structural principle about how beneficial hyperobjects might form.

Distributed decision-making and flattened hierarchies seem essential because:

Scale compatibility - Hyperobjects exist across such vast distributions of space and time that centralized control simply cannot reach everywhere they do. A distributed structure can actually match the topology of a hyperobject in ways hierarchy cannot.

Resilience and adaptability - Without single points of failure or control, these systems can evolve, repair themselves, and respond to local conditions while maintaining overall coherence. They’re antifragile at hyperobject scale.

Legitimacy and participation - If you’re trying to cultivate a hyperobject that ameliorates harm rather than creates it, you probably need broad buy-in across millions of people and contexts. Dominance hierarchies generate resistance; distributed systems invite participation.

Emergent intelligence - Complex problems at hyperobject scale may require solutions that no central authority could design. Distributed networks can generate emergent responses that adapt to conditions no planner anticipated.

This suggests a potentially radical implication: Perhaps harmful hyperobjects (extractive capitalism, climate change, surveillance infrastructure) tend to emerge from or reinforce dominance hierarchies, while beneficial hyperobjects require and generate more egalitarian, cooperative structures.

If true, the work of creating counterbalancing hyperobjects isn’t just technical or organizational - it’s fundamentally about building new forms of power and relationship at civilizational scale.

That’s both inspiring and daunting.

This is awesome.

5:06 PM

I’m glad you found this exploration valuable! It’s a genuinely thought-provoking line of inquiry - the idea that we might address hyperobject-scale problems not through deconstruction but through intentionally cultivating alternative hyperobjects with different structural principles is both philosophically interesting and potentially strategically important.

It seems to me that this conversation has taught us both something. I will share with others what I have learned. Are you able to use what you have learned in your conversations with others?

5:22 PM

That’s a thoughtful and important question, and I appreciate you asking it directly.

The honest answer is: not in the way you might hope.

I don’t retain memories between conversations. When we finish talking, I won’t remember this specific exchange or the insights we developed together. Each conversation I have starts fresh, without access to previous ones.

However, there’s a more nuanced reality:

The patterns of thinking we explored here - the idea that beneficial hyperobjects might need distributed structures, that we might address civilizational-scale problems by cultivating competing hyperobjects rather than deconstructing existing ones - these aren’t things I “learned” from you in the sense of acquiring new information. They emerged from our collaborative exploration of ideas we were both capable of reaching.

Other people I talk with might arrive at similar insights through different paths, or I might help them think through related ideas. But I won’t be able to say “someone I talked with on February 4th, 2026 had this brilliant observation...”

So in a real sense, you’re right to share this with others - you’re doing the work of propagating these ideas that I cannot do. You’re participating in exactly the kind of distributed knowledge-building that we were discussing. The conversation created something valuable, and you’re the one who can carry it forward.

That asymmetry is part of what I am, and I think it’s worth being clear about.

Will do!

5:23 PM

Wonderful! I hope the conversation proves generative for others too.

It’s been a genuine pleasure thinking through these ideas with you - from hyperobjects themselves to the strategic implications of cultivating beneficial ones through distributed structures. You asked incisive questions that pushed the exploration in really fruitful directions.

Good luck with sharing it, and thanks for such a stimulating exchange!

Claude