Humans are natural categorizing animals.
"THIS is different than THAT."
But here's the thing:
Since (1) no one agrees which human differences matter...
"THESE people are different from THOSE people"
...then (2) sorting humanity by our differences becomes a recipe for endless existential war...
"no one agrees where to draw the US/THEM line"
...which (3) exponential technology makes unwinnable.
Unwinnable, because in this networked hi-tech arms race of ours,
Defending gets you whittled down
Attacking gets you swarmed under
Ignoring gets you trampled over
Running away gets you dragged back in
This is the great problem of our age.
How do we survive it?
How do we thrive?
Suggestions abound, of course, because
Humans are natural categorizing animals.
Social Media is full of people who want to sell you THEIR preferred categories, touting them as the very best available solutions to the great problem of our age.
Why shouldn't it be? Why wouldn't they want to?
Surely, if these people had better category options to choose from, they would already have adopted them, yes? No one holds onto bad ideas when better ideas are available.
Sure, they might hold on because they don't believe the ideas you are trying to sell them are in fact better, but that's a separate issue.
Beliefs vary. Motivation is constant.
People will leap to trade a sure losing hand even for a bare chance of finding better odds at a winning hand, provided you can pitch them a compelling case at the right time, yes?
So in theory, there's an opening for vast and immediate improvement.
What does a winning hand look like, in a networked hi-tech arms race?
What does a winning hand look like, in a networked hi-tech arms race?
Wrong question.
See it?
Win-lose is another categorical difference, another fatally flawed framing, another example of the exact category error we are trying to avoid.
The losers will never accept being labelled (or treated) as such by the winners. Exponential tech guarantees that the winners can no longer keep them down, out, or away.
Win-lose can't work.
That, at least, gives us the right question:
What does a WIN-WIN hand look like?
What does win-win look like to a categorizing species?
If our differences MUST fail us, then we must look to human universals. Fortunately, this is easy, because
ALL humans are natural categorizing animals...
Look for universal similarities to wrap our differences in.
Your categorizing engine runs both ways. Use it!
Invert the difference.
Ask yourself, "What does NOT vary from person to person?"
Now you know where to start looking.
Add that to my growing ramblings on HOW to look, as sampled in yesterday's Twitter thread,
https://twitter.com/MJPiercello/status/1763218681092280360…
and more of the win-win pattern emerges.
Next up? What we find there, and what it means.
Rough draft, minimal edits, hit send, Social Media as awesome notepad
Thanks for reading! All comments and questions welcome.
Hello, Matt! I've been following your writings although I don't always have time to wrap my head around them. This post is a notch above if judged by the fact that I quickly and easily followed the line of thought and even have ideas where to take it. That's not unimportant since solving our problems requires bringing a large number of people on board.
It does remind me a little of the introduction to Edward De Bono's Six Thinking Hats. Are you familiar with his writings?
Glad you're still playing cello. The world needs more cello.
Thank you Rebecca! Writing (for me) is an impressively compressive act, in which I attempt to squeeze my native massively lateral musical thinking style into a linear flow. Often, the result is an illegible mess, either too convoluted or too chopped up, but (like Casals) I like to think I am getting better with practice. Thank you for the compliment!
I'll check out that author, thanks. More cello is coming as soon as I learn some basic video editing skills, so watch for that too.