The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Running the 'Systems Discourse' Gauntlet | Frankly #42

Episode Date: August 25, 2023

In this week's Frankly, Nate considers 7 different continuums of perspectives people use when taking part in a "systems" discourse, such as The Great Simplification podcast is attempting.  In such complex and often controversial discussions, each of us has a point of view that stems from our own personal experiences, knowledge and identity - yet how we channel that point of view into the larger discourse matters. How does understanding our own perspectives potentially help us side-step mental roadblocks and become more open to other possibilities and actions? What are the hidden ruts that we can fall into when discussing the future with others that we're not consciously thinking of and can we learn to avoid them? Can shifting our perspective along the spectrum of potential responses open dialogue and facilitate more inclusive and cooperative conversations as we collectively try to meet the future halfway?   To Watch on Youtube: https://youtu.be/XsNmLwX2X_4 For Show Notes and More: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/frankly-original/42-running-the-systems-discourse-gauntlet 

Greetings. This will be the first, frankly, that I've ever recorded while on allergy medicine. I'm taking Benadryl to ward off the evils of August ragweed here in northern Wisconsin. So I'm going to start with a fact. This is not going to be what I talk about specifically in this episode. 10,000 years ago, there was approximately 50,000 kilograms of wild mammal, terrestrial wild mammal weight for every human being that was alive on the planet. Fast forward to 200 years ago in the year 1800 when there were 1 billion humans, and there was approximately 80 kilograms of wild mammal. biomass relative to each human. Now, during that period, most of that was the result of a growing

population of humans. But since 1800, when there were 80 kilograms, to today, there are only two and a half kilograms of mammal weight per human on the planet. That is a result, yes, growing the number of humans from 1 billion to 8 billion, but also the decimation of wild mammal populations. There are still 6,000 plus mammal populations, but the number of them and the average weight of them is diminishing. I find this to be a profoundly disturbing statistic, but when my friend Tom Murphy shared this with me a few days ago, it was on the heels of what I'd been noticing from recent, frankly, and podcast episodes, the vitriol and tribalism and different sort of tenor in the comments on YouTube and in my emails. Someone said, I subscribe to your podcast

because of XYZ guests, and now I'm unsusely. describing because of this clown. I got massive positive feedback from a recent guest episode. At the same time, I got massive negative feedback. So I think what I'm attempting here is really difficult. And today I'm going to describe what it looks like. Of course, I'm making this up, but it's tethered to reality. And also, tethered to science, to run the gauntlet of discourse about the future. So when I talk about the reduction in animal biomass relative to humans, as one example, people have radically different responses to such a comment, such information. And I'm going to list seven categories of how I see people thinking and reacting differently to facts. Could be a fact about animal biomass or about climate change or about

poverty and inequality or about renewable energy or anything. But I can only understand the world the way that I understand it. But I can begin to understand that other people receive, integrate, absorb and understand information differently, and that's what I want to outline here. So in last weeks, frankly, I talked about the intersection of the economic four horsemen of the 2020s, financial overshoot, nuclear war geopolitics, complexity and fragility of our global supply chain and the social contract. but how did that intersect with the ongoing overshoot impacts on the natural world, including but not limited to climate change, ocean acidification, biodiversity, loss, habitat, loss,

plastic, endocrine disruptors, etc. So the first filter is what do we care about? And obviously as biological beings, many people care about themselves and their family first and foremost. And there's kind of an asymptotic spectrum where we move from self to family, to others in our small community, to our city, to our nation, to our world of humans alive today, to the natural world of other creatures alive today, to the future and the conditions of future humans and other organisms and to the deep future. So what do we care about informs how we respond to different facts?

The second filter is the timeline. Most people, especially if they have steep discount rates, care about the present. What is this information you're giving me going to influence our impact? this weekend or my life right now. And we can imagine the deep time future. We can imagine 50 years from now. But it's so distant that it's almost behaviorally like an abstraction. So it takes tolerance and patience and a certain sort of approach to think about the distant

future. So the second lens with which people view information differently is the present versus the future. The third lens is something I've often talked about, is islands of expertise in an ocean of disconnected stories. So many people care about a single issue. Nuclear energy is the answer to fossil fuel depletion. Climate change is the only thing that matters. Focusing on the global south in the next 30 years is the thing of import. Of course, all these things are important.

But if we focus on a single issue, we neglect the nuance and the system synthesis of how everything fits together. And we also might come up with wildly different conclusions on what to do. So it's very common to have people really focused on a single issue. And oftentimes their identity is attached to that issue. But I think the system synthesis is at least what we're trying to do on this podcast. The fourth filter that is different with people, is an all or none binary yes or no versus nuance.

The Ukraine war, Russia is bad. USA is bad. Russia and USA are bad. Climate change is a socialist hoax. Climate change and we're all going to go extinct. Dolphins are Aboriginal peoples. That's what my friend DJ thinks. Dolphins are big fish and we should kill them and eat them. There is kind of a, the psychological concept of splitting that it obviates any

discomfort by being certain about something versus the nuance of not everything is black or white, but there are gray areas on almost every topic. But many people, especially in today's social discourse are kind of binary. They're all or none. They have an extreme view on everything. This is a challenge. All these categories are not orthogonal to each other. There's a little bit of overlap between them. And this one builds on what I just said. The fifth category is certainty versus a probabilistic future. I have trained myself to think of the future in terms of probabilities. I don't have one prediction. I have percentages under a distribution. A couple months ago, I did a frankly on probability perception and reality. I encourage those who haven't watched it to

watch it because we have different probability distributions in our head where oftentimes people hear some podcasts that they don't like and they are certain that humans will go extinct in the next 20 years. and that is their response. If they said there was a 3% chance that humans could go extinct because of nuclear war or Yellowstone Caldera or an asteroid, I would have no quibble with it, but it's the yes or no certainty and confidence of certain outcomes that is very behaviorally prevalent

versus thinking of various aspects of our future in terms of probability. The sixth category that I've come up with, for lack of a better term, I will call it bitching versus building. A lot of people when they hear information, they just want to blame the fossil fuel companies or the rich or some demographic in the political spectrum. And it's mostly about casting stones. And a much smaller group of people can suppress that impulse, that is an evolutionary impulse of an in-group and an out-group dynamic, and try to build. Try to say, yes, I understand there are these problems, but what are we going to do to solve it? There is no perfect answer. There is no solution, but there are responses.

So I've noticed in email, you know, the emails I get are largely people who want to build. They are constructive, positive. The YouTube comments, and I have a little sticker on my upper right on my monitor here from my staff. Nate, don't read the YouTube comments. But I do. Not all of them, but I do read quite a few of them. There are a lot of people that just like to take down some. demographic or some issue and it's not a constructive positive response. The last filter in running

the gauntlet of social discourse around the future is there is science and there are values and science does not have all the answers, but it's better than many other tools. Values are what we care about. And if we, you know, link science and values together and also kind of try to suppress our identities, we get to what some people refer to as a metamodern perspective or an integral perspective. Ken Wilbur is famous for integral theory. And there are many people like Thomas Bjorkman talking about metamodern. But it's not a tribe, say, it's trying to take the best of kind of postmodern thinking and look at the integration of science and values. I think that's what I'm trying to do on this podcast is all the little

things that I just said, the seven filters. What I'm trying to do is kind of do the stuff in the right column of what I just outlined. And if you think about the graph of the four horsemen overlapping with the environmental challenges, what I'm trying to do, I was about to say what I'm trying to do is in the middle, the intersection of that, but it's not. I'm not in the middle of the economy and the environment. I'm trying to integrate the entire thing, which is a different objective. So whether it's the Benadryl or just that I've run out of things to say,

I don't have a grand conclusion for this other than to say that as this podcast grows, and it is growing quite rapidly because, of course, the world converges on the most important problem and the most important problem is the entire systems integration of the human ecosystem. I ask you to be patient and tolerant and have some empathy, not only for me, but for others who are listening and watching and trying to contribute. Because all humans don't think the same way. We don't respond to information the same way. And this is a very, very difficult field of landmines to navigate. This podcast could be way more popular if I just chose a single issue, energy depletion or climate change and just focused on that.

But what I'm trying to do is integrate all the issues and invariably that's going to upset people, threaten people's identities, be too complicated to integrate. And yet I'm going to try. And we'll see where it goes. I have a lot more to say. Hopefully the ragweed end soon. I'll have another episode next week. Thank you.