The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Vanessa Andreotti: "Hospicing Modernity and Rehabilitating Humanity"

Episode Date: May 29, 2024

(Conversation recorded on March 25th, 2024) Show Summary:  In this episode, Nate is joined by educator and researcher Vanessa Andreotti to discuss what she calls "hospicing modernity" in order to move beyond the world we've come to know and the failed promises that "modernity" has made to our current culture. Whether you refer to it as the metacrisis, the polycrisis, or - in Nate's terms - the human predicament, Vanessa brings a unique framing rooted in indigenous knowledge and relationality to aid in understanding, grieving, and building emotional resilience within this space. What does it mean to live and work within systems that are designed to fail, embedded in an aimless culture? How do we as individuals steady ourselves and create inner strength before engaging with such harrowing work? Importantly, what could education look like if founded in the principles of intergenerational knowledge transmission and emotional regulation, that are centered on our collective entanglement with the Earth?  About Vanessa Andreotti: Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti is the Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria. She is a former Canada Research Chair in Race, Inequalities and Global Change and a former David Lam Chair in Critical Multicultural Education. Vanessa has more than 100 published articles in areas related to global and climate education. She has also worked extensively across sectors internationally in projects related to global justice, global citizenship, Indigenous knowledge systems and the climate and nature emergency. Vanessa is the author of Hospicing Modernity: Facing humanity's wrongs and the implications for social activism, one of the founders of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Arts/Research Collective and one of the designers of the course Facing Human Wrongs: Climate Complexity and Relational Accountability, available at UVic through Continuing Studies.   For show notes, including referenced articles and additional resources: https://thegreatsimplification.squarespace.com/episode/125-vanessa-andreotti   To watch this video episode on Youtube → https://youtu.be/h5kQ7_IZ8YI 00:00 - Intro 1:52 - The House of Modernity 16:34 - Hospicing the House of Modernity 22:56 - Theory of Change 31:49 - Affective Responses 43:55 - Healing Trauma 54:42 - Relational Intelligence 59:11 - Metabolical Literacy 1:04:59 - Dopamine Dependence 1:07:25 - Depth Education 1:09:27 - Reception with Young People 1:14:38 - How Do You Keep Going? 1:20:22 - Personal Advice 1:28:34 - What Would You Do with a Magic Wand?  

You're listening to The Great Simplification. I'm Nate Higgins. On this show, we describe how energy, the economy, the environment, and human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future. By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming great simplification. Today's guest is Vanessa Andriotti, who is the dean of the Faculty of Education at the coming Great Simplification. the University of British Columbia at Victoria on Vancouver Island. Today we discuss Vanessa's work on projects related to global justice and citizenship, indigenous knowledge systems and nature, as well as her book, Hospicing Modernity, Facing Humanity's wrongs and the implication

for social activism. When discussing the metacrisis, sometimes it can be difficult to see alternative paths out of the challenges we face. Vanessa is one of the leading thinkers towards alternative ways of learning and living. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Vanessa Andriotti. Oh, Vanessa. Hi, Nate. Great to see you. Good to see you.

You too, you too. You are one of the most requested podcast guests in our inbox over the last six months. And here we are. finally, after two reschedules. So, welcome. Thank you. Very happy to be here. So lots to discuss.

So let's start at your recent well-known book, Hospicing Modernity. I am constantly reminded and pointed to it. Can you just start out by defining what you mean by modernity, maybe give us a guided tour on what the house that modernity built looks like. Sure. So first of all, I think I need to start with a land acknowledgement. And it's a land acknowledgement that is not necessarily the usual one. It's an land acknowledgement that acknowledges the land as a living entity, not a resource or a property.

It's also an land acknowledgement that acknowledges our ancestors, both past, and future ancestors and the responsibilities we have towards both, including the responsibility to correct mistakes of past ancestors. There's also the acknowledgement that we're here as a result of a system of violence. And if we're thinking about all the minerals that have been mined in places for us to be here today, being able to have this conversation, we also have a responsibility there to, acknowledge the costs and the externalized costs, both on the land and for the people of that violence. And the last acknowledgement is the acknowledgement that we're all related, so entangled

within a much wider metabolism that is the planet that is currently under a lot of distress and including the distress caused to the indigenous communities. If you're in a settler colonial country like I am in what's known as Canada, we also need to acknowledge the indigenous people of the land. In this case, the song is in this climate in other La Cuanian-speaking nations who have a connection with this land. So with all of this preamble, I think the preamble also shows where I'm going, with what I generally say in the book in terms of a critique of the system,

not only of thought, but of effect and relationality that we have inherited from the past. I gave the name modernity. In the book, we talk about modernity as a who rather than a what so that we can understand stories in its living dimension. And in the book we talk about modernity as a story that is expiring because its promises are no longer credible. They were unrealistic from the outset. They are perceived as broken, but they are no longer credible.

And it's the promise in the book we talk about a house to bring all the elements of modernity as an entity together. So it's the house that is sitting on the planet and the house is exceeding the limits of the planet. And that makes reference to the planetary boundaries reached and us of shooting the limits of the planet. So this house, the story of the house is that the house has a foundation of what we call separability, which is the separation of humans from the rest of nature. And this separability creates lots problems. one of them is that it removes the intrinsic value of life and creates the conditions for us to be

feeling worthless in a sense and needing an external validation so that by participating in the economies within the house, the economies of modernity, we get that sense of value and that sense of worth. So you have to be producing value in order to be worthy of being alive. The separability also creates lots of hierarchies between species, between cultures, between individuals. And that sense of separation, that's imposed sense of separation, also causes neurobiological impairment. So it prevents us from sensing or experiencing reality as interconnected and entangled with other beings.

And if we don't experience reality like that, we will neglect. and deny our responsibilities for that entanglement. So that's just the foundation of the house. Then we identified two carrying walls as well of the house, and the first carrying wall would be a caring wall of the modern nation state, which we tend to associate with the protection of its constituency, of people. However, if you look at the history of the modern nation state, It was created to protect property and to protect property owners.

And if we look at the dispensation of rights like human rights, labor rights, indigenous rights, they usually happen when there's interest convergence between the protection of capital and the protection of people. When there is no interest convergence, this dispensation of rights by the modern nation state is canceled. Then the other carrying wall is a carrying wall of universal reason. So that is a single story, single seamless story of progress, development, in human civilization, that universalizes itself and that also it raises the possibility of existence of other stories. So other stories then either backward because this one is the one heading or pushing humanity forward

or they have no value. So a word that has been used to talk about this erasure is epistemicide. It tries to kill other stories, other epistemism. And then there is a roof of the house, which is then sitting on this two carrying walls and the foundational structure of separability, which changes. We have had the roof of industrial capitalism.

We have had roofs of socialism, depends on where this house has been located. But currently we have the roof of speculative, algorithmic global capitalism, macro capitalism, if you like, where there are differences in structural limitations of this roof because the optimization of profit, also generates in this roof specifically a form of anonymity that makes it very, very difficult

to make people accountable or responsible for what it does to the rest of the house. So in the book, we talk about the history of the house too, the fact that the house was created and is sustained through violence. So there is one picture in the book where you see overconsumption within the house an overproduction of waste, and then two arrows to the planet, one of expropriation of what we call resources into the house and the other one of the waste, like waste disposal, into the planet. And in the planet we see dispossession, destitution, genocides, and ecocides. And then from there, we have another picture of the house where you have the penthouse at the top,

Then we have the middle of the house with the stairs of social mobility in the basement of the house and the sewage of the house going into the planet and some people in the planet trying to fight for something else for another way of existing but being kind of engulfed by the sewage. And then we talk about the different modes of engagement with the house. So those who want social mobility, those who want just the protection of the house and do not necessarily have either access to social mobility or buy into a different ontology. And those in the planet, like the Hunicui people in the Amazon, who are fighting against the financialization of the forest,

even through carbon trading. They are fighting against carbon trading because it financializes the forest and prevents them from living and seeing themselves and existing as part of the forest. But these other possibilities of existence outside of the house are rendered unintelligible or backward or sometimes because of deforestation, because of the pollution of the water or about the impact of climate change, it becomes impossible for you to stay outside of the house and then you knock on the house's door because you have been dispossessed. So with all of this, the house is in trouble. The house has lots of cracks. The roof is cracking. There's lots of mold and fractures.

And we see ecological, economic, mental health crisis within the house. And so this image invites us to think about the kinds of questions that happen when we are facing the signs of social and ecological collapse. And then the next question to be asked is, how are we who have been born within the house prepared to approach these questions or to ask different questions as we see this house crumble? There's more, but I think I'll pause there and see where we go with that. The carrying walls almost sounded like propaganda. Like part of the story that we're telling is to keep others from recognizing what you're just describing. So there's like this erasure of the epistemes that you mentioned.

I hadn't thought about that, but it makes sense to me. It's very interesting. My work, my research is around education. and how education, instead of seeing education as something that addresses ignorance, it's about how we can see education as something that addresses denials or sanctioned ignorances, socially sanctioned ignorances. So in that sense, I think we have been told stories about progress, development, and how we're building a civilization in ways that,

that erase the costs of the story to the planet and to other people's, right? And the difference between seeing education as something that addresses ignorance and seeing education as something that addresses denials is that if an education that addresses ignorance, if you present the information to people and they say, oh, okay, I get it. Then they go and change something. But if you're working with denials, we're working with sanctioned ignorances that are rewarded. So whenever you present this information, there is a response and a reaction to deny this information again and sometimes to even shoot the messenger, right?

So my work has been trying to look at what are the denials, what are the anchoring denials that we have reproduced through education. So, for example, the denial of complicity and violence, the fact that our comforts, securities, enjoyments are all subsidized by expropriation, exploitation, and they happen at the expense of the other people of the land. So we deny that, and we enjoyed them thinking that there's no consequence, for example. The second denial is the denial of unsustainability, the fact that infinite growth or growth-based economy cannot be sustained in the long term in a finite planet.

Then there is the denial of entanglement, the fact that we are part of the metabolism of the planet rather than separate entities, and that the planet itself and its metabolism has wisdom and has bio-wisdom that can come through, our own bodies, our bodies are also land. So we're talking about the land. We're talking about our bodies as land. We don't see that. And education doesn't really, doesn't really encourage or promote that idea. And the last denial that we have anchored, with my research collective, we have anchored our analysis on is the denial of the depth and magnitude of the challenges we are facing right now. And with that, the condition desire to look for simplistic solutions that make us feel and look good,

but they do not address the root causes of our predicament. So in that sense, we are kind of unprepared to face the magnitude, the depth and the scale of the problem. And that takes us back to education, what education can do. So education has been part of the problem. How can, and what kind of education could help us through a different form of coexistence? You've used a lot of different words and lenses that I've used, but at the core of your story is the superorganism is out competing all the other cultures. It's blind, it's hungry for energy and resources,

and the individual components of it, us, you mentioned worthy of being alive, they're only worth something to the superorganism if they contribute value. So our stories rhyme quite a bit so far in what you're saying. So you describe the house, and your book is called hospicing modernity. So the house needs hospicing.

What does that mean? Why do we need to hospice modernity? If it's destructive and dying, shouldn't we focus on the birth of something new? Or how can you unpack this? That's a very interesting question. That comes up very often too. So where the analysis is coming from, and it's coming from collaboration with indigenous communities that talk about the house

and colonialism basically as a disease. and if you try to fight colonialism as a machine, you need to stop it and it manifests as a machine too. So you have to have that strategy there. But if you fight it as a disease, it's a different approach. If it is a disease in a superorganism, what we're talking about is that if the moment that we try to construct another house or to fight it directly, we have to use its tools and its modes of existence so that it even becomes intelligible for that. So what I'm saying here is that, and maybe I'm using this other metaphor in an artistic project with Azul is one of the Colombian artist who works with us.

And it's like there is a Sikh dragon, right? spewing fire flame and burning everything. But the moment you try to fight the dragon, you become a dragon yourself. Or the moment you kill the dragon, you also have many other dragons being born out of that killing. And if the dragon is sick and you don't want to kill the dragon, you want the dragon to be healthy and to be integrated in the ecology of things, then the work that you need to do is very different. And it's the same with the House of Modernity. So if something is dying and carrying a lot of undigested teachings and lessons, if we try to

imagine the new from that indigestion or that constipation, we will only be able to imagine the same, but in different clothes with a little bit of change. Unless we process these teachings of the house as it is dying, we cannot imagine something that is very different. That is not going to reproduce the same mistake. So offering palliative care to the house dying, offering a death with dignity, or figuring out how to find what can heal the dragon, right, is work that is very different from trying to build something from the undigested. lessons of the oath. So we talk about hospicing as disinvestment in the futurity of something while you have the patience to compost the shit that has been accumulated. At the same time

that you are offering prenatal care to what is being born, not actually being born, what's gestating. But without suffocating what is going to be born with your projections, and idealizations coming from the unprocessed lessons of the old, because we haven't processed that collectively yet. And then this new thing, also having a healthy, skeptical pragmatism in relationship to that, saying what is being born is hopefully or potentially wiser. And that wisdom will depend on how much we've learned or we've been taught from the old. So it's potentially wiser, but not necessarily, right? It can actually go in a worse direction that the other one is coming.

So this narrative of progress, dialectical narrative of progress of a thesis and thesis and synthesis and synthesis that require a progression to something that is better is part of the house of modernity and needs to be interrupted if we are to do this differently, basically. So the word hospice is correlated with having cancer or end-of-life things. Is it presumed in your book and in your work that modernity is in its demise, that it's fatal and something else will come after? Is that a given? We, I think the assumption that is that the, it's terminal.

It's terminal. So basically the idea that growth, basically, economies in the finite planet, it's just impossible. And that goes back to what Daniel Schmatterberg has been saying about the narrow boundary intelligence being terminal as well. So the optimization of profit in this context is not going to lead us to, we don't have another planet. We can't expand the boundaries of the planet. So in that sense, modernity is dying. But I, also hear that the superorganism is extremely resilient, right? And figuring out how to, back to the dragon, figuring out how to get to the point where we can experiment with what could interrupt

this libidinal attachments, because we're not only talking here about ways of thinking, its ways of desiring, its ways of hoping, its ways of relating, its ways of imagining, that have been contaminated by this disease and how difficult and challenging it is to intentionally not reproduce that when a lot of it is also unconscious. How difficult it is to not reproduce that,

your hope that 1%, 5%, 10% of humans kind of wake up and see the story that you're presenting. But in doing so, they don't turn into the dragons themselves or kill the dragon because that perpetuates the dynamic that led us to this. But what would be the... What's the theory of change? Yes, okay. Thank you. It is an interesting thing too. And so back again to theories of change that originate in context of high-intensity struggle, right?

So we've been working guided with the guidance of indigenous communities in the Global South. That the first thing that they did with my team, my research team, going there, was to draw attention to the arrogance we have around. our own theories of change, the theories of change that are intelligible in the global north. So their understanding, one of the things we were taught, we were taught, for example, is that if we are a collective organism, whatever it is that we do in the direction of healing of this dragon, if we use that metaphor, is, it resonates within the whole organism, but not in the, ways that we can predict or control.

Right? So there is that aspect of thinking about it metabolically, but not in a causal mechanistic reductionist way. So we were challenged with that too because we wanted to know, okay, if we do this, what's the result? If we try that and give me the outcome before I even start doing that because my motivation is related to that teleology, right? And what we were told is that you need to trust the invisible to make the impossible possible

if you're working in an entangled way. And for us, that was also very challenging because one of the things we didn't want to reproduce in this collaboration was spiritual bypassing of things. Okay, let's just trust the universe that it's going to create the conditions. And that is training, I think, that we have to understand we don't have in Western societies about working intuitively from the gut with us. So what we were told was that any experiment in the direction of healing that is fully politicized can create ripple effects that are not in our control. and that there will be a time where it's going to be maybe if the way the storm is going to be upon us. The storm is already upon many, like social collapse happens all the time so that we can be here, right?

Our privilege is predicated upon collapse somewhere else. So when our bubble of protection is breached and we are faced with the collapse ourselves, that collapses a teacher. And at that point, there will be an opening where a lot that has been waiting to come as a teaching will be able to land, basically. But the only way I can explain, the best way to explain is through a slow, not a slogan, what is it's it called? it's a saying that we have in Brazil, which is that in a situation of a flood, you can only really swim when the water reaches your bum.

Before that, you can only walk our weight. So basically, this hospicing process, although we started without the protection bubble being breached, and basically, like, you can't sing, your way out of this basically. You have to encounter the flood. You have to encounter the flood in ways that are already really high for you. And you need to remember that your body is water, and that you can swim.

Other people have swam before you. And that's the role, I think, of indigenous knowledge is in this. I don't believe indigenous knowledge can give us the instructions of how to swim in our particular flood that we're going to have to face. But they can remind us that it's possible to swim because these people have survived. And that in itself creates the possibility that our current, that gives us the idea that our current neurophysiology and the limitations that have been imposed upon it are one configuration.

There are other configurations of existence and of being that are possible. possible and that could survive even when the waters are very high. So whatever we are doing in the hospice is preparing for the collapse of the house or the storms that are coming so that we can approach it in a very different way. But in order to do that, we have to recognize that the ways of approaching problems that came from the house itself are not going to be sufficient. in helping us when the house comes down. But we could maybe buy some swim trunks and some flippers

and think about the need to swim when the water reaches our bum. How do you say that phrase in Portuguese, by the way? Well, it's not the most sophisticated. So it's just can't to nata when the water bathe in the bunt. Okay. Awesome. Which is not what I would say in the podcast, but there you do.

So. So is there any way that the dragon metaphorically could somehow morph into an orangutan or a deer? Because if the orangutan, I mean, if the dragon dies, then like lots of people and infrastructure, there's a collapse risk. So the hospicing isn't a perfect analogy, but what are your thoughts on that? So with Azou, who is the artist that came up with this dragon metaphor, we were talking about the need for people who can work with the fire flame and do the damage control of the fire, and that's extremely important. But we also need, according to Zul, the artists, the alchemists, the alchemist, the clowns to distract the dragon so that other things are experimented with within that diseased body, right, that can immunize the dragon to the disease.

So the heat of the dragon, the warmth of the dragon, with the dragon's consent, could be put to good use. The dragon is part of the ecology. It is the disease that is the problem, not necessarily. the dragon. And the dragon, as you said, can shape shift and it can and can be scaled, right, to become enormous or maybe the medicine to the dragon is one of shrinking the dragon. It allows this flexibility. I think what metaphors do in this case, how it's dragons, and there's always the risk of overdoing the metaphors, but they invite

relationally, the part of the brain that or our neurophysiological system that has been starved for for relationality to come to the fore and to see the movement of things rather than the focus and fixate on the form of things. I totally agree with that. And I totally believe that we do need artists and storytellers and theatrical and musicians to open a way. window between our neocortex and our limbic system in a way that lets us think outside of the box, as it were.

So, Vanessa, you write a lot about difficult emotions or what you call affective responses. I think it would be helpful for our listeners if you dove into this, but let me preface that by a question. I've heard you pretty actively discourage people from reading your own book. What's up with that? The hospicing process, right? So the hospicing process requires an internal intuition that something is actually dying. And in Western culture, talking about death in a culture that is trying to avoid it

is actually kind of announcing it, and it often prompt aggressive responses back and super emotionally charged responses back. So the kind of education that I'm talking about, which I'm calling probiotic education, which is to deal with that undigested constipation, right, that we have, it requires people to be ready to do it because maybe the metaphor in there is that that kind of education creates some diarrhea, controlled diarrhea. And it is about composting and digesting stuff. So if people come to this wanting something else, wanting mastery, wanting certainty, wanting control,

and they kind of get caught into the deep side of the pool without anybody there to support, right? it can be actually harmful. So a third of the book, I think, is about saying, like, look, if you're, this, if mastery, certainty, control, predictability, simple solutions is what you're looking for. Please don't read this book because you, if you go to the deep end and then you find yourself drowning there, there's nothing I can do to support you, right? I should probably have the same disclaimer on this podcast generally. I think so.

But you're right. You're right. Which is why I don't advertise it per se. It's just word of mouth and the people that show up and want to hear conversations like this. So go on about affective responses and difficult emotions. What's an affective response? So generally when we're thinking about emotions, we make a distinction between emotions. and cognition and reason, right?

In order to move away from that distinction, because emotions are physiological responses, and so is reason, right? Everything is a physiological response. Then there is effect theory. So that's coming from both psychology and psychoanalysis, this idea that if we need to be thinking about our bodies rather than just our brains as the neuro circuit,

it that experiences the world. And effective responses are these physiological discharges that we have that can be pleasant or unpleasant, that can be of arousal, that can be of numbness too. So there's a spectrum there. And so the work around the house is to check the design, the architecture of these responses that is conditioned by the house. So we are rewarded and encouraged to respond in certain, we learn to respond in certain ways. And within the house, the way that we learn to respond to complexity, for example, is to see the layers of complexity that we have the stacked ones, and then we collapse them into one.

And in this collapsed layer, we impose a narrative of coherence that becomes our certainties. we then edit out what doesn't fit this narrative of coherence and we police the borders, right? And the energy that is necessary to defend and protect that narrative of coherence is enormous that we have to put in that. So it becomes when in times like now where complexity is exponential, it becomes a kind of a pressure cooker, right, that you have to invest so much. in keeping the lid on, that it takes all your energy. It takes all your head and heart space. And that's the time where if you believe the promises of the house are broken and that there is somebody who can restore the possibility

that the house can stand and exist in a finite planet the way it is, you are going to vote for those who make that promise. Right. So if we're thinking about this scenario with the lid of the pressure cooker, what we need to do in terms of dealing with the difficult emotions that is related to opening that lid. Opening that lid as we expand our capacity to see the different moving layers of complexity, to let go of the attachment to certainty, control, coherence, and consumption of things, to be able to sit with difficult, painful, and complex things without feeling overwhelmed or immobilized.

So if we don't get there, if we don't get to this stage of being able to face complexity or, let's say, VUCA, which is volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, we will go back to the narrow boundary relationships and intelligence. and understandings. So for me, this taking the lid off and being able to not only cognitively face complexity, but also effectively to be able to have the neurophysiological setup, to not have to have all the answers, to approach things with curiosity, to not be invested in that, in that, either or or dogma is part of what education needs to do so that we can get to the wide boundary intelligence that Daniel also talks about.

But that's different from wisdom. That's still different from wisdom, I think. And figuring out, we talk about for a compass that gestures towards. wisdom of four different dimensions. One is emotional sobriety. So emotional sobriety or emotional stability is where you are able to interrupt the compulsions that have been conditioned by modernity. And here we're talking about we're conditioned to one certainty and control.

We are conditioned to consume everything, not just stuff, but also experiences, relationships. We are conditioned to consume critique. and outright. So figuring out a rehab process for that emotional instability is one piece. The next piece is relational maturity. So realizing that Western society or Vandernity or the superorganism has, it's a teenage, they are in a teenage state. And that process of growing up cannot be done for others. So going into indigenous communities and saying, okay, teach us how to grow up is not an option, really. We can look at other cultures that produce grown-ups as uncles and

aunties who can redirect, but we can't appropriate that knowledge for our own maturity. So when we talk about relational maturity is the realization of how embedded we are in the metabolism of the planet and how the responsibility that we have towards everything needs to be visceral, not something that is just an intellectual choice. Then we have, the third one, is intellectual discernment, which relates directly about how we can move from narrow boundary to wide boundary and learn. to diffract ourselves. Diffraction is a word that is used as opposed to reductionism. So reductionism tries to reduce things. Diffraction tries to expand and see the multiple layers. And that needs to be done with our own identities, right?

So we have this, it's another metaphor. And a methodology we use called the bus within us. We invite people to see themselves as a bus of, creatures with a driver and then there are people at our passengers at the front who you know very well, passengers in the middle who you only hear from time to time and passengers at the back of your being who you don't know. And we invite people to observe that dynamic conversation and to learn from the dynamic, to learn to learn from the dynamic. And this is because if we can't hold space for the complexity of our own response,

to things, we have no chance of holding space for the complexity around us. So here we talk about, and back to your question about difficult emotions, here we talk about developing the stomach to face the amount of shit that we need to compost without throwing up, without throwing a tantrum, and without throwing in the towel. And the last thing in the complex, past towards wisdom is intergenerational responsibility. But here again, we're not talking about just human responsibility, but to the human and non-human family. We are talking about the ability to say the buck stops here in my generation, right?

We've inherited the superorganism, the house, the sick dragon. But I need to do something because this is placing, the future, the children, on the path, or humanity, on the path of premature extinction or mass extinction in slow motion, as Nina Wahaniqui talks about. So the intergenerational responsibility, again, is not an intellectual choice. It is something visceral, something that comes from the gut, and that when in a crisis, will move you to do what's needed rather than what best fits your self-interest. Wow.

There's so much that resonates there. Again, you're using different words to describe some of my own core beliefs on this stuff. When you say the buck stops here, I presumably you meant the financialization of the human experience, not the actual buck and dough and fawn stopping here. because that also is possible. So emotional sobriety, relational maturity, intellectual discernment and intergenerational response. I just got back from India.

I had a break. And one of my biggest ahas was that to merely explain the facts of our situation, the ecological breakdown, the impact on the ocean, are unsustainable spending, debt, energy depletion, social fracturing. If you just give people those facts, it's really not going to lead to anything. And part of the reason is that we have trauma. We are not behaviorally healthy, stacked humans for the most part. and I think we need to have healthy people in community nourished with exercise and good food and

oxytocin and friends and music and in an emotionally and reptilian fight or stability of that system before we get to any before we get to intergenerational response because if you don't have those sorts of humans, they're in a constant observing, observing the walls of the house that you described earlier. And it's not a productive place to be in. So how important is it in your work that we get humans to that starting point? You know, a friend of mine James says we need libraries of healing around the country, around the world. Can we get there? What do you think about that?

And are you working in that direction? So this is also super interesting question that has come up for my collective a lot of times. And this is because we work at the interface of questions related to social and ecological violence, right? And sometimes there's two things. There's conflict in that interface. So we have groups that go more. in the direction you're talking about, especially oxytocin is problematic, though, because oxytocin is both the cut-on hormone, but also a hormone of mothers and babies. And if that hormone is not

transcended in the relationship between the mother and the baby, you have a problem. Well, oxytocin is also a huge tribal in-group, out-group. Yeah. Exactly. So we have a problem there. Maybe serotonin and acetylucoline might be a better metaphor for the neurochemical direction you want. What does ceticoline do? It is associated with epiphanies, right? With in laughter. So engaging with curiosity and something not predetermined what you want from that relationship. Because oxytocin in a society where relationships are transactional can become.

both leading to mutual codlish and self-infantilization. I can tell you more of that, where we got this from, but I think I'm going to go back to the idea of, so there are groups that want to go along and get along, and they feel that that is the most important thing that they need to do. And what happens there is that generally critical questions, it becomes difficult to keep the level of discomfort and dissonance that you also need for the neuroplasticity to happen and for you to become, like, to enact responsible reasoning, right?

So the reasoning then is in service of this projective relationships where you have to belong and be accepted and have your identity validated. So it can go in that direction. It's much more complex than that. I'm simplifying here. On the other hand, you have all these other communities of critical questions, right? Where becoming critical is one of the in-group, out-group things too. You are then competing with each other to see who's the most critical or the highest moral high ground. And then it can become also a competition for who's the most oppressed.

and who is going to be most deserving of having the platform or the microphone, right? So we've been working at the interface of these two things and saying we need something else. We can't have only a therapeutic space because we can't hug ourselves out of this. And on this side, we can't have just a critical competition space because we can think ourselves out of this either. right? So figuring out, and it might not be a combination of the two. It might be something else all together. You see what I mean? Like the neurochemistry of both. So one, the critical one, is based on its dopamine for sure, but also the transgressive bit about it, right? I want to be

transgressive. The other one is I want to be, I want to be accepting. and accepted, which goes into a very specific form of relationship, where we would need to go is a place where we do not have to make any effort to feel accountable. It's not coming from the external, right? It's coming internally. We are accountable. And where we are okay in walking or moving together in a foggy road. And learning, and learning together and making mistakes together, but being accountable for those affected by our mistakes. So it's a very different neurochemistry.

Serotonin metaphorically, and again, I'm not a neuroscientist. I don't want to be a neuroscientist. But serotonin could be a metaphor for this sense of entanglement and relationship with everything. However, without the teachings that go with that relationship, it can become this, and this is what is reinforced in Western society, this idea that the elation part of it,

I feel connected. But when I want to feel connected, it's I want to feel connected with everything that's beautiful. But I forget that I'm also connected with everything that is destroying that beauty. Right. So figuring out how to have a serotogenic process that allows us to compost the shit.

without drowning in the sadness of it because it's super sad. So maybe a shit composting party would be the closest that we have, where we see ourselves as both insufficient and indispensable. So that foundational regard, unconditional regard, is the removal of the foundation of separability of the house and the restoring of the intrinsic value of your life. you do not have to prove why you're here, right? The Huniqui and the Amazon talk about this also in this useful way here.

They talk about identity and belonging within the house being grounded on human constructs of group affinity and affiliation. So your identity would be about like where you come from, citizenship, racial affiliation, ethnic affiliation, whatever. But then they say, although you cannot bypass that, that is important because it's also related to the conflicts and the shit that we have inherited. There is also another thing that defines your identity that we have forgotten within the house, which is a umbilical cord that we have with the center of the metabolism of the earth. And that umbilical cord is in the gut. And that's why it serves as an antenna for the information you receive from the earth about what,

to do next. However, if you're not paying attention to that, or you don't have the discipline and the practice of relying on that umbilical cord for identity and belonging, which is not identity and belonging defined by human parameters, right? It is a, it is beyond understand. It's a direct experience of being alive in a metabolic system that is the planet that is, that is, and intelligent. Two. And if you look at the ceremonies and the educational practices

of these communities, you will see that a number of different things. Number one is that the relationship with pain is very different. And from the beginning, like you look at a kid and you already imagine this kid as an elder, right? And the role of the community is to support this person into becoming a good elder

and good ancestor for all relationships. The other thing, so it's a different relationship with pain. It's a different relationship with death. It's a different relationship with responsibility. But it is also in different neurochemistry. Because through the engagement with different plants, and here I'm not just talking about ayahuasca, there's thousand plants in the Amazon, for example,

that you encounter and that they become your teachers. And they show you that there is a conscience beyond human conscience, and that the human conscience is very limited in what you can imagine. So you learn to relate to the mystery of existence, the motion of the metabolism, and both the visible and invisible matter of reality. And I think that for me, like when I heard Daniel talk about, and you talk about wisdom, that is the place, I think, where it is about the whole, but it's about the matter, both visible and invisible, the matter, the motion, and the mystery of living in something that is much bigger than ourselves. So Daniel and I talked about wide boundary intelligence and also he has an upcoming paper that we're going to do a podcast on called the naive progress, which is that we measure something as progress, but we ignore all the other negative things that happened along with it. And we just maybe are in denial about those things. But is this narrow boundary intelligence, do we also? have a narrow boundary perception of self and how we're related to everything else. Like I mentioned,

I just got back from India and my coach was one of the disciples of Krishna-Merti who famously said, without relationship, you are not. For to be is to be related. You exist only in relationship, otherwise you don't exist. So I think in your book you write about relational, intelligence? Is this a similar sentiment to that? And how do we potentially expand our definition of self from the really narrow boundary that our culture currently has? Yeah, definitely. So if we're thinking about narrow boundary, the way that, so we have encountered the work, the conversation between you and Daniel, and took it to the Amazon, to Chief Ninoa, Honikui, where as we were developing this project called the University of the Forest.

And it was such a useful thing, heuristic. I have to thank both of you for the gift that, and it was exactly what we needed at the time, because we were talking about colonialism as a disease, and the narrow boundary framing helped us think about cognitively, what does this narrow boundary do? Effectively, what does it do? And relationally, we looked at five A's in terms of narrow boundary, effective conditionings. So within the House of Modernity, we will be looking for the first A is moral, epistemic, and political authority. Then the next A is arbitration of justice, lawfulness, and common sense.

sense, then we have the A of unrestricted and unaccountable autonomy. Then we have the A of affirmation of our virtue and our innocence and purity. And the last A, which is related to the other four, is the accumulation of capital, right, and appropriation of capital. So figuring out how this. investments that we have are, which are effective, right? We are not calculating it, nor necessarily consciously. It's what's rewarded.

It is what is expected of you in this kind of society. So in order to open up the relationality, which is the gut part of it, that we have to get to, we need to process these things that are restricting the ways we define our being and our beingness within other beings, right? So you talk about the umbilical cord to the earth, and that comes through our guts, but isn't like the majority of serotonin not produced in the brain, but in our guts? And so doesn't our food supply, which has lots of problems with processed food and pesticides and endocrine disruptors and all that,

doesn't that kind of already sicken the umbilical cord connection to the earth? For sure. Yeah, the problem, the de, the d's ease of the umbilical cord has many different metabolic, both material and invisible components to it, but the food for sure. We're being poisoned. So you've used the word metabolic often on this podcast. And I think in your book you talk about metabolic literacy.

I talk about metabolic literacy too with the superorganism and the biological scaling of organisms and ecosystems. How do you see what you term metabolic literacy relating to my phrase, of the economic superorganism. Or can you explain what you mean by metabolic literacy? This looks like a test. No, not a test. It's just that we're, I'm, I know a little of your work.

We have many common friends. We have lots of people that are like, you've got to get Vanessa on the podcast. But in hearing you, I just see so many parallels. It's like we're telling the same story with a different tone and a different vocation. I agree, and there's so many resonances, and I'm so happy that I encountered your work and the podcast as well. And as I said, like, I have to say a huge thank you for the latest heuristic. It really opened up a completely different way of going about the other project, the University of the Forest Project, and we were also happy about it. So thank you again. But back to the example,

question. I think that in the book, let me go back to that, to what's in the book, I mentioned that I had heard in an indigenous gathering a discussion about individualism versus collectivism versus metabolism. And I was like, what? I have never heard it to describe a way of a way of perceiving political interactions, right? So generally we tend to think about it's either individualism or collectivism, but both are super anthropocentric.

When I asked, when I probed, what is this about? And this is about not seeing yourself as a separate entity. So everything about our lives is about interaction. So the air we breathe is what the trees exhale, right? Whatever comes into the mouth is already dead or dying or will be digested

or become part of the communities that digest whatever comes next. And what we leave back to the earth is also going to become food for something. out. That basic, like super basic understanding of being part of something, of this movement and catalysis of things is already missing in whatever education we have within the house. And it's not just the food or the air, but also all the chemical processes in the body, the chemistries, right, that they are also contagious. So if we're thinking, for example, about education, the current education system is very dopamine focused.

It's about mastery. It's about achievement. It's about individual competition. Right. And we are training this metabolism to look for that and to feel good when you get that high, when you hit that high. And that high is very, ephemeral in a way, right?

So it's not a high that lasts very long. If you hit the high of dopamine in five minutes, you will want another one. So if we look at education in other communities, in other cultures, you'll see that it's not necessarily going the same direction. And Krishna-Morty actually shows a very different neurochemical setup for education that could be used in this case as a comparison.

It's not the only one. There are many others. Yeah, I think, I don't, I don't, I'm remembering the exam question, which was to associate it with the superorganism. The superorganism is giving a, go ahead. You passed. Okay, thank you. So the superorganism.

sells us a very, very limited configuration of well-being, right? And that is no longer working. And as an educator, where, so back to the discussion about social and ecological collapse, when we talk about social and ecological collapse, people generally imagine it's going to be collapse of access to something, to water, to food, or a big wildfire, access to housing, access to. And with the work with the communities in Brazil, they were worried about something else that now I'm seeing here in the global north. They were saying that it's our internal infrastructure that is going to collapse. that thing that modernity is selling about well-being is no longer is not going to be sufficient.

Well, and it's going to be worse for the global north because of what you just said, is it because we've been educated. Our education system is about cranking out newer hits of dopamine. So our individual neurochemistry is a one-legged stool and ignores serotonin and acetycholine and the other things, whereas indigenous cultures don't have quite that same, you know, hyper-focus on dopamine. So, right? Dependency, right, on that. So the well-being in this community has a different neurochemical cocktail.

Right? And it may be a more lasting one than the dopamineic one that requires constant fixes. But I think what I was remembering that I needed to say was that the way that I'm seeing this in the global north as an educator is to look at the schools today. And I am following a little bit of the work of Zach Stein who works with Daniel around this, who talks about screen time as low-grade child abuse, right? because it is algorithmically occupying that infrastructure and exploiting it and extracting value from it. So if we look at schools today,

the education sector across the board globally is in trouble, what's happening, I believe, is that the children are the canary in the mind. Right? The level of emotional dysregulatory, that we see in schools is enormous. Teachers are not prepared to address that. What we see in the kids reflects the metacrisis,

the polycrisis or the perma crisis in society. And Gen A who's coming, I think, beyond Gen Zs and millennials who have already had most of their conditioning of relationality being done through the screen, they come also with a different kind of anger. And they can feel the sadness in a very different way.

So I want to remember to get back to the superorganism question because I have one more. But you brought up Zach Stein. He was on my podcast three days ago, the recording. And he basically says that the root of the metacrisis problem can be found in education, that our education system is totally contributing to what's happening. And he echoes a lot of the things that you just said. So in looking at work, you are also proposing a new model of education, which you call depth education.

Can you explain the core philosophy behind that? And are you hopeful for that to scale? The quickest way to explain master education is again through metaphor, basically. So, and to contrast it with mastery education. So mastery education, the dopamine based thing that we were talking about is about like putting tea in the cup and then measuring the cup and seeing how much content you've been able to assimilate. Or to think about conquering of a peak, all the skills and competencies. And I'm using conquering with a very colonial connotation, right? You conquer the mountain. Now, depth education in contrast would be

more about expanding both our frames of reference and preparing our effective and relational landscapes to face the good, the bad, the ugly, the broken, and the messed up of humanity within us and around us and figuring out from this teaching what to do next and being ready to experiment with different things together in a way that is not grounded. on those five A's that I talked about or the search for certainty, control, coherence, predictability. And that moves us from the narrow boundary to wide boundary to wisdom. So I know you are a professor and I think you're the head of a department at UBC, Victoria and elsewhere. But do you actually teach now still students and how are these concepts resonating with

with young humans in your classes? So I'm the dean of the Faculty of Education. Okay, yeah. It's a different level. Do I teach more rarely now? Because I mean in leadership work are different things that we have to do. There is a course that is a community, it's open to the community that has been created at UVIC called Facing Human Roans.

climate complexity and relational accountability. And there's so much to be said about this course in terms of what we've learned from trying to make this an offering that people can access. But one thing that we had to do was to create a questionnaire. Just like in the book, you have half of the, like not half, but a third of the book trying to convince people not to do, not to read the book. There's also a questionnaire that's trying to convince people not to take the course, in order to be responsible, right, in order not to promise, because people

are used to the promises of mastery. And if they come with the same expectations, it can go in a very, it could be even harmful. So people need to understand what they're getting into, and they need to be ready to the ask of the course, which is an ask that says, you're not going to be told what you think or what to do. You are not going to be told. you're going to be offered unconditional regard. However, you need to suspend for six weeks, because the course is an intensive, asynchronous course with tutorials,

but for six weeks you need to suspend your desire for simple solutions. You need to suspend your desire for hope in the future, because hope needs to be in the present. You need to suspend your desire for community, for human community. For six weeks, it's temporary. temporary suspension.

And this is because what we found in piloting and testing the course, that people use human conversation as the way to deflect from actually going deeper into what they need to go deeper in, right? So if for six weeks you can't do that, don't take the course. If you need to be talking to people all the time, maybe this course is not for you right now. You are just echoing so many things in my recent life because I just did a six week journey in India. And my coach noticed that in the 30 people, I kept, when we got to an uncomfortable area, I would do some joke or some social thing. And he would yell at me and say, nay, stop doing that.

You have to look inward and be quiet. And that's what you just said. And it also is six weeks. Yeah, that's a synchrony. Serendipity. And so we've tried to map these traps, right, where people get caught, like, they get stuck, basically. And invite people to look at that. And we're not the one saying, judging, basically.

We're just saying that this is what we've mapped. And it's up to you to take, to embrace the responsibility for your learning and unlearning. So that's that. part about people going through this course and us helping, supporting other faculty members, not only at UVIC, but across the board, to design based on principles of regenerative inquiry, which is what depth education is about. So we're trying to develop, it's not the scholarship so much, but the practice of designing in a specific way, designing learning experiences in a specific way.

And then at the same time, I'm trying to apply the same thing in leadership. So universities are going through a lot right now. There are many different layers of the challenges of universities. And they are very much in the VUCA context, like volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity. In certain contexts, you can talk about the meta crisis and the polycrisis and the perma crisis, but in certain contexts, you still can't, right? So being a leader in an institution or in a sector, in a higher education sector that is going through this is also extremely rich in terms of practicing and testing and experimenting with tools of inquiry, right, that we need to be able to try to figure out how to support the dragon and healing itself. So it seems to me, Vanessa, that at the core of everything that you're describing is an invitation to humanity to grow up and become more accountable and responsible for the obvious if you're paying attention, but culturally hidden patterns of destruction that modernity rests on.

So this is a big, big calling. And I know because I've been, you know, working, swimming the same river, because in my life, it is up to my bum. But on a personal level, how do you do this? What is the most challenging thing that you find? And how do you find this work rewarding, if so? It's an enormous question. How do you do this? What's coming to my mind now is a response is with support, right?

And I cannot, we wouldn't have been doing this without the support of people in high-intensity struggle saying, go out there and do it. So many times I wanted to quit, Nate. And you know, I think there's a fantasy that romanticizes the communities and romanticizes, like, let's just leave our jobs and be off the grid, right? and figure out a way to escape this and find our own space of self-care. I've been there and I was told to go back and to work in the belly of the beast, basically, right? And understanding that this is also, this work with the disease is difficult. At one point, one of the community, one person in the community said, it's like you're working in the ivory slum, right?

So it's where there's a lot of existential, a lot of material wealth, but existential poverty. And that was said with a sense of, I'm sorry for you that you have to do that, but if that's where you need to go. So there's that part. But there's also the part about having a collective too. Before, when these fantasies were at their highest, and I really wanted to quit. It was because I was working alone, right, mostly alone. And once the collective was established from 2015 onwards, and it's not a collective of affinity of identity.

It's a collective of affinity of inquiry. And some of the things we talk about is the need for an AA for humanity. So I have rehabilitation process. And part of the commitment of this collective is not to leave ourselves off the hook. So once you're an addict, you're always an addict, right? So figuring out a group of people

who are interested in the same kinds of experiences, So now when I have a question or something that happens that I need support, there are a number of people in the collective, including the communities, including artists, including other scholars and neuroscientists, that I could actually use my WhatsApp to call and say, what do you think of this? What do I do? And to bounce ideas with? And we are not trying to arrive at the a universal answer to be scaled up, but at experiments that might be used for five, ten years from now when the shit literally hits the fan, right? So that kind of commitment and the expansion of capacity to collectively coordinate to do that is what we need to be able to just keep moving. 100% agree. I could never do this work without a network and a collective that care and understand. There's no way that a single person should attempt this.

The community is so essential. I often ask people some closing personal questions, but before I do that, I'll ask you one more question based on everything you've said today. What do we need to collectively need to learn now? What would be your synopsis of that as a collective? What is most important? What's coming to me as a very short answer is wide boundary coordination with wisdom breadcrowns. That's great.

I love it. So this has been really, really interesting and inspiring. You've got my acetycholine going. this past hour and a half. So you've seen this podcast. So I asked these questions to all my guests. You obviously wrote a book, Hospicing, Modernity. So you're fluent in these issues of global upheaval and anxiety, what you call hospicing, modernity in the house. Others would call the polycrisis, the perma crisis, etc. What personal advice would you have to the viewers of this show or the listeners of this podcast during this time? There's a question that is coming to my mind that is driving the sequel to

Hospice Modernity, which we're calling it, the working title is Outgrowing Modernity, like the process of Outgrowing Modernity. And the question that drives that text is this. What if you knew not only in your head, but in your bones, that in the next, 10 to 20 years, what is viable today will no longer be the case. What is viable as a way of being and relating and exchanging and living today, especially in the global north, is no longer going to be the case. And what if your response could be guided or by a compass of emotional sobriety, relational maturity, intellectual discernment, and relational and intergenerational responsibility. What would you be doing today? Yeah. You just start that with lots of people and

we might be surprised at the response. But they have to understand, I mean, how many people would you think truly feel it in their bones that the next 10 or 20 years, most things today are not going to be sustainable? I mean, clearly the majority of people listening to this podcast, but in the general population of the world, I don't know. So when I work with teachers, it is those who are looking at the levels of increased anxiety, depression, and self-harm. With students.

In the kids, yeah. And that's got to be a lot, I would guess. And parents. Right? So it is coming. It's just that it's not going to be what we imagine it to be, that collapse of the infrastructure happens in different ways for different people. With me, a lot of the, and I was working in this area, so I've focused on complicity and harm

from the beginning, but it really, when the water reached my bum was to see my children, when my daughter, and this is published, so I'm not worried about oversharing. And she's now working with me, but at 15, she was pushing back against this work like hell, putting us all through a very cruel process, right? Because it's like you have to figure it out through the fire. And she was saying something like everything that is beautiful is being destroyed. being a young person today is like watching a train wreck in slow motion while you still want a Gucci bag and you know the Gucci bag is a scam but you can't interrupt that desire and at there the pain

that you feel is like a phantom limb pain because all the institutions around you, including the medical institution, will tell you, you're okay. Why are you feeling that pain? Right. So as a parent, an educator, having to hold space for that without the child actually being open to even conversation was what got me to a point of, like, we have no choice. what worked before is not working anymore. And we don't know exactly what's going to work,

but there's no other choice than to try whatever you can. Right? And we can't try alone. We need to try together. So for the young people listening to this show in their early 20s, late teens, whatever, what advice would you have for them facing all these things we've been to?

discussing. My advice would be for us all, not just for them, we need the intergenerational conversations that matter. It was for my daughter, I never imagined she would come back to the work because she had made it very clear that she didn't want anything to do with me or no work in that kind of capacity. And now she is one of the facilitators of the facing human wrong scores. And for her, And here I would like her to be speaking for herself and she could come with me in one of the sessions. But and we did one together and that's what changed everything for us. We did a series with Sand together.

For her seeing it's possible for other generations to learn and learn-learn together is what created the bind to the process, a process that is uncertain, it's complex, it's full of frustration, but finding the joy in the struggle with others required multiple generations learning together in conversations that matter. And that is completely aligned with our evolutionary past because we lived in communities where three generations were constantly in relationship and engagement. Yeah, I think we've lost that in the West, certainly. And maybe it goes back to what Zach is saying.

So Zach is focusing on the intergeneration of transmission of knowledge. But when we think about transmission of knowledge, it's not one way. It's both ways. Well, and this plays a large role because you have family gatherings and the younger people are, this is a higher threshold for their attention. than grandpa telling stories because these things is more interesting. And so the technology also is relevant to all this. What do you care most about in the world, Vanessa?

I think it's just the possibility that we can do this. Like this is not, despite all the evidence that we have of the impossibility of this regenerative. that is necessary, I believe it's possible. And going back to the advice from the communities, learning to trust the invisible to make the impossible possible has been extremely important, but surprising. And when you say invisible, you could also expand that to mean the emergent, maybe things we don't understand and can't see and

the emergent and that which is already there, right? I don't think we will be able to imagine exactly in a causal way what's going to make it happen. I agree, and that's why I continue to do this podcast because there's things that can't be seen or predicted that all of a sudden we are with these conversations, at least hypothetically changing the initial conditions of the future. Yeah.

Yeah. So if you could wave a magic wand and there was no personal recourse, what is one thing you would do to improve human and planetary futures? Hypothetical question. That's a very good question. I would need a week to think about it. If I'm thinking right now. would be to

remembering we are we're part of metabolism we are humanity is one organism and would be to amplify and I'm surprised

with the answer that's coming but serotogenic production serotogenic so amplify the production of serotonin somehow Coupled with the teachings that go with that towards responsibility, right? Because it could be sometimes serotogenic reset experiences can also be very navel-gazing without that intergenerational transmission of knowledge about responsibility.

Right. So it's serotogenic. How do you say that word? Serotogenic. I'm not sure if that's the right word. Scaling with intergenerational experience as part of a collective. Intergeneration experience and directed towards wisdom. Directed towards wisdom.

So let me ask you a very difficult question. Again, hypothetical. If everyone in the world could, without any danger, experience ayahuasca right now today, would that change the narrow boundary, wide boundary path to wisdom? And would it expand the sense of self to include other people, other beings, other creatures, other generations? What do you think? Not necessarily. Okay. I'm not advocating for that. I'm just curious because I think it does connect you to a wider sense of a non-anthropocentric viewpoint of the world.

It can. Okay. It can. But it's not. So there are lots of stories about failed experiments in that that we share with the communities, actually. But one of them, I will do it very quickly because I think that's an important one. So when the Hunikui people opened the ceremonies to Western people to come and do it there with them,

they really believed that once people did encounter ayahuasca as a spirit as a sacred plant, they would then become responsible towards the forest. And that didn't happen. So they then started asking, why? why aren't people able to use that reset that you have and mobilize it for responsibility? And remember, like, the other thing that Daniel said about responsibility and restraint, this is super related to what they're talking about there too. So one of the ways that they explained why is that, like, their stories, the knowledge you need,

in the discipline you need to encounter this plant, this plant on ethical terms. One story would take seven days, and seven days of repeating the story and understanding the different layers of the story. And they were like, Western people don't have seven minutes of attention. So it's because of our education system

and preponderance of dopamine and all that that make us less able to have that shift? In attachments to arbitration, authority, autonomy, it's the effective landscape, right? The other thing that they talk about is that, so again, people come to take the experience and what they are seeking is the oceanic feeling, the oxytocin, right, of being in the womb, right?

Back to the womb, back where you had a parent taking care of you and all the responsibilities are externalized, right? And Ninoa says most of the ceremonies, there are ceremonies for healing childhood trauma. It's there. But most of the ceremonies are about death and aging and more responsibility, not less. It's the other way of life,

not going back to the womb, but going back to the land. Right. So you're only getting half of that. and it's the responsibility part that is really the important part of what we face going ahead. And responsibility as restraint. Thank you so much, Vanessa. Thank you.

If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of The Great Simplification, please follow us on your favorite podcast platform and visit The Great Simplification.com for more information on future releases. This show is hosted by Nate, Higgins, edited by No Troublemakers Media, and curated by Leslie Batlutz and Lizzie Siriani.