Integral Life | Inhabit: Your Speech @IntegralNaked | Uploaded April 2022 | Updated October 2024, 10 hours ago.
What are the unique challenges that prevent you from inhabiting your most authentic and embodied voice, and how can integral thought and practice help us to overcome those challenges — in our society, in our communities, and in our own consciousness?

Ryan and Corey begin by taking a look at some of the central cultural, technological, and behavioral challenges that take us further away from our most authentic expression, wonderfully illuminated by Jonathan Haidt’s recent article, “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid”. We were both very excited about Jonathan’s piece, which resonates deeply with so many of the critical themes we’ve explored in the Inhabit series over the months and years.

In his article, Haidt identifies three primary factors that bind society together: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories. He then explores how each of these became so compromised in our civilization, and suggests some possible interventions (what I often call “enfoldment mechanisms”) in order to get things moving in the right direction again.

“We must harden democratic institutions so that they can withstand chronic anger and mistrust, reform social media so that it becomes less socially corrosive, and better prepare the next generation for democratic citizenship in this new age.” -Jonathan Haidt

And here is how Haidt describes these “enfoldment mechanisms” as they are supposed to exist in our governing institutions:

“It was just this kind of twitchy and explosive spread of anger that James Madison had tried to protect us from as he was drafting the U.S. Constitution. The Framers of the Constitution were excellent social psychologists. They knew that democracy had an Achilles’ heel because it depended on the collective judgment of the people, and democratic communities are subject to ‘the turbulency and weakness of unruly passions.’ The key to designing a sustainable republic, therefore, was to build in mechanisms to slow things down, cool passions, require compromise, and give leaders some insulation from the mania of the moment while still holding them accountable to the people periodically, on Election Day.” -Jonathan Haidt

In our conversation, Ryan and I try to pick up where Jonathan left off, suggesting that we need to install these sorts of enfoldment mechanisms in our own interior operating systems, as much as in our exterior/collective operating systems. In other words, we cannot transform these systems “out there” unless we work to transform our own consciousness and communities “in here”.

How do we do so?

Ryan and I try to answer this question by looking at two fundamental lines of development — the intrapersonal line (how we relate to ourselves), and the interpersonal line (how we relate to each other), and using those to help supplement the advice given by Haidt in his article so we can engage these problems in all four quadrants simultaneously.