In this latest podcast, Riel Miller and John Sweeney return for another conversation and are joined by Josh Floyd. Dr John Sweeney is from Narxoz University and Riel Miller is Head of Futures Literacy at UNESCO.
Guests: Riel Miller, John Sweeney and Josh Floyd
Host: Peter Hayward
Conversation Question
“Should the field abandon preferred futures? Recently, Richard Slaughter even called into question the efficacy of "alternative futures." Distinguishing between anticipation for "the future" and anticipation for "emergence" also highlights this tension. How can (and must) the futures field shift in both theory and practice to deal with this core tension? “
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Listen to Part 1 of the Conversation
Conversation question: “Should the field abandon preferred futures?“
Listen to their past interviews on FuturePod
Audio Transcript
Peter Hayward
Hello, and welcome to Futurepod. I'm Peter Hayward. Futurepod gathers voices from the international field of futures in foresight. Through a series of interviews, the founders of the field, the Emerging Leaders share their stories, tools and experiences. Please visit Futurepod.org for further information about this podcast series. As part of our Futurepod conversation series, john Sweeney and Riel Miller were in conversation in Episode 60, where they tackled the question, "Should the field abandon preferred futures? How can (and must) the futures field shift in both theory and practice to deal with the core tension between anticipation-for-the-future and anticipation-for-emergence?" It's a very interesting and revealing conversation as each of them wrestled with the felt dilemma of on one hand wanting to argue for futures that they feel are clearly better while simultaneously recognizing that the pursuit of normative civilizational projects probably reflects telological and utopian visions that are based on command and control assumptions, and a possible global monoculture. Their dialogue is creative and playful, and yet, still grounded in a critical reality. If you haven't listened to it previously, then I do recommend you give it a listen. Welcome back to Futurepod. John, and Riel.
Riel Miller
Good to be here. Thanks a lot.
John Sweeney
Thanks so much.
Peter Hayward
Great. Now Futurepod invited people to contact us with any follow up questions they had for John and Riel. And in an interesting twist, we were contacted by a previous Futurepod guest, Josh Floyd, who we interviewed way back in Episode Five. So we decided rather than have me read out Josh's questions for the other two, it made sense to invite Josh back to make it a three person dialogue. Welcome back to Futurepod. Josh, can you explain to the listeners and to John and Riel what arose for you listening to their initial dialogue?
Joshua Floyd
Thank you, Peter. What particularly struck me in the initial dialogue was that this tension between anticipation-for-the-future and anticipation-for-emergence was set against what I think Riel and John both described as the monster of our current way of being, or current ways of being. I took this to be something along the lines of what we could call high modernity, including its political economic apparatus of globalized markets, market capitalism, and extractive industrial practices. It occurred to me that if the futures profession is really going to get to grips with the need for the shift that Riel and John were discussing in that conversation, then it's going to be particularly important to have a really clear and detailed grasp of the nature of our monsters, of the monster of our current way of being. We really need to know something about the details of that. And so it occurred to me to wonder whether what I’d inferred was a sufficient understanding of that, or whether there might be more to it. And in particular, whether we might need to look at the deeper origins of that current situation that Riel had identified as being so toxic. So that might be an adequate place to start off.
Riel Miller
Thank you, Josh. Thank you, Peter. Thank you, John. This is this is a very rich conversation. And indeed, since our recordings, these issues have remained at the forefront of many conversations that I've had, and also a lot of kind of moments of reflection and waking up at night and wondering about these issues. One of the ways that I tried to present the topic I think, Josh, you put quite well which is the very long foundation related to issues of continuity, repetition, a monumentalism, as I've called it, that is something we can find in many, many different human communities over the past 5000 years or more, is a system in which I think, in a way, it can't simply be reformed. And this is very much at the heart, I think of the questions of agency, and therefore very much at the heart of issues related to identity, the "who am I?" and "what am I?" and "how do I feel?", therefore very connected to meaning in the daily sense of meaning. And this is a rather stark way of putting it but everybody understands the proposition that reforming slavery as a system is not on, you abolish slavery, you don't reform it. And in the same way, I think that the fetishism of immortality, which in some senses, I think was an evolutionary outcome that was particularly comfortable, and also effective for the perpetuation of power structures, is something that our species needs to come to grips with. This does not at all, answer the question about the profession, because it leaves really wide open, the issue of how do you abolish such things? And how do you make such transitions happen. And I don't need to underscore this, in today's context, issues around racism and Black Lives Matter, etc, we understand very clearly, that when you abolish slavery by just passing a law and fighting a war, it does not eliminate so much of what slavery is about, and so much of what people are still carrying with them in the way of scars in the way of baggage, that is part of their heritage, and hence part of something they need to claim, but also something that can weigh very heavily. And so I don't have a particular answer here, for either the issue of the profession, let's say, the gardener cultivating a new garden, I don't know if that metaphor, or that way of thinking makes sense in this context, because I don't really understand how, as humans, we can even really play a role in what to me seems to be a completely complex, meaning genuinely full of novelty, not deterministic process of the emergence of the world around us. I'll stop with this. It's my suspicion of that role of that agency, that is, in fact, one of I think the most effective mechanisms for me to see things I wouldn't otherwise see, by suspending that agency, by denying this instrumentality, all of a sudden, all sorts of new things start to appear. And other than walking the talk and learning it and talking about wisdom through experience, I don't know how to address this from within the old paradigm. And to a certain extent, that's reassuring, because it means that it's potentially genuinely outside the existing paradigm. But you know, it doesn't provide an answer, either for the transition, or what to do endogenously within the existing system. So sorry to be a bit long about that. But I think it's a really, a really crucial question.
John Sweeney
And just to maybe dovetail on Riel's point and to maybe bring it back to the field then, because I think Riel's response does fundamentally locate it within the context of a tension that is actually playing out right now. So there's a movement, of course, within, you know, various organizations to focus on the question of evaluation. And certainly in the last year, we've seen not only an explosion of interest in futures and foresight, but of course, as I've tried to put it, the age of bad scenarios. So lots of coming back to this great "how can we get better at doing the things we didn't do before the crises?", because clearly, that will help us now. And I think that the kinds of pathologies that we're seeing enacted, have worked to kind of strengthen this modality, or maybe even tyranny is maybe a bit too strong but maybe more appropriate, of this paradigm of strategic foresight. And I think ultimately, this idea of being able to, as Riel said, not reform, but to move towards abolishing those kinds of pathologies. And I mentioned the movement professionally towards evaluation. What has emerged is a real clear sense that there is not only a multiverse, but it's almost like a multi planetary battle playing itself out for what is it that we're on about and what is it that we're really trying to do as a field and as a profession, and if it does come back to this idea of being able to, quote love our monsters, then I think that there is this tension around, as Riel as articulated, agency as a space for love and maybe agency in and of itself. is not the appropriate frame or lens there, maybe it needs to come back to love, which allows us to bring it back to a very embodied way of thinking about the kinds of relationality and inter relationality, that is inherent to what it is that we do, and inherit to the kinds of ways of being and becoming, that I think we want to see, persist, and such that the future remains a space to be able to be emergent. Whereas I think part of the initial question, and I think part of what I liked about, you know, Josh's question is to bring us back to are we dealing fundamentally with, let's say, a construct that is built in from, let's say, a biological or a civilizational perspective, right? And how do we begin to confront that, and so I, I'm really excited to continue to peel back the layers of that. And to come back to this core tension at the heart of what seems to be playing out all around us.
Joshua Floyd
The question of agency is a very interesting one, or strikes me as a very interesting one. And it occurs to me that so often, agency is taken at face value as the agency to put forward or to advance particular structural responses to the world that we find ourselves in, that have built into them ideas about, from my particular perspective, what is going to be better, universally or better for many. And so I wonder if there's a different sense of agency that it is that we're needing, that we're trying to get to here that is related to this idea of wisdom that Riel introduced into the conversation.
Riel Miller
I'd love to pick up on that. And thank you both for teasing out elements here. And I think, you know, one of the things that is striking, and I appreciate very much the collective effort here to find vocabulary and find ways of talking about what we're trying to get at, and to me that's also indicative of transitional thinking, which is that we feel the inadequacy of the existing language. And we kind of grasp or seek the liminal, the marginal, the things that are in the fissures and cracks of what we see and think around us. If I can take that kind of more emergent perspective on all of this, we can't ask the question better. In fact, that becomes one of the pathology. And we can't think generally either. My well being and my good life, you know, my next door neighbor might be miserable, and maybe richer and have more cars or whatever. I mean, these notions that are reflections of our way of being, which is this kind of statistical, aggregational, command and control, building fortresses and immortality perspective. These things inhabit all of our ways of looking and feeling and being together. So let me just take the example I guess, of the invention of writing, the invention of writing took place in you know, a number of different parts of the world, and it's slowly spread or not around the world. Writing clearly augments a very basic human capability, something that most humans mastered for one reason or another. Again, that's a question of how did evolution generate our ability to speak, but we have this command of language and we augment, but by augmentation, we also narrow and focus this capability, which is the capability of writing. I think that futures thinking, anticipatory systems and futures literacy as I like to call it, is a similar type of very basic and general characteristic. And it's very difficult to say, what it would mean to create a global access, definitely not a global culture, but global access to understanding anticipation in your own context. In other words, in that sense, augmenting a very basic human capability. My scenario side says, wow, that would enable all sorts of amazing things to happen. On the other hand, I know very well that despite the fact that when they invented, you know, writing in Sumeria, or wherever they weren't thinking of "E equals MC squared", and the atomic bomb and Hiroshima, but certainly there's a relationship. The enabling capability of writing and passing along knowledge makes it possible for us to kill ourselves through the tools that are us. So I'm not, again, saying that this is better or that it's a formula, it seems simply to me to be a step that we can take. And that it allows us to understand the world around us better. Other than that, I don't have much to say about the better side. And I also don't really know if I have much to say about the instrumentality. I can't even say what it would mean to have identity in a world in which I'm not thinking about success and status and comparing and generalizing and instrumentalizing and planning, etc. I mean, it's too distant, it's too impossible for my imagination. And so I can't, the words don't even exist, the relationships have never been constructed. So all I can say is that it seems to me to be something that we can do. And from the point of view of understanding the world, that's something we should do. But other than that, I don't really know.
Joshua Floyd
And that not knowing sounds, to me, very much consistent with what I hear within the conception of anticipation-for-emergence, it seems necessary, almost essential that that commence from a disposition of not knowing. Or to put it a different way, if it is anticipation-for-emergence that we need to learn to embody and enact, then it has to start from that position of not knowing.
Riel Miller
Agreed. And just to kind of elaborate on that, I mean, not knowing is kind of almost anathema to the current framework, right? So the monster there that we're talking about, is that fear -- and I saw a piece about darkness and the night, people are afraid of the night because the wolves come -- I mean, you know, so this is kind of going back to the point about is it, you know, is it genetic? Is it something, you know, so deeply hardwired, as we could say, which is a mechanistic, by the way, metaphor, but I mean, hardwired into our being. And maybe, again, I don't know, but I don't think so. I mean, there I'm ready to take a kind of a gamble, and say that we are our tools. In other words, as we learn to use fire, as we learn to use our ability to read and write, we actually change who we are. And that that is a part of the evolutionary process, we are not separate from those things. And so if we can, in some way begin to defuse the menace that is I think being used, I don't think they consciously constructed it, but it's being used by those in power to sustain the reproduction of the monsters we know being better than the monsters we don't know. And therefore continuing with their way of doing things and their position in the power structure, or their system of oppression. I think if we can begin to kind of lay the seeds of a different relationship to uncertainty, complexity, emergence, novelty, but also, and this is crucial, and we don't get to this nearly enough, ephemerality, we are so preoccupied with duration, durability, things that, you know, will impinge on the future. And it was it was very, very striking to me, and just also, I think, indicates the scale of the challenge we face, is that in discussion with Leon Fuerth a few weeks ago, when I said not knowing and not doing, he said, "Well, what do we do with the waste from, you know, our atomic energy and our atomic weapons?" And the answer I have, which is completely inadequate in a way, is that the challenge that I see us dealing with in this conversation is in part, how could we put ourselves in a position to never make that kind of choice, because when you choose to disrespect the future, or simply say, have the arrogance to impose on the future, all of that toxic waste, you're doing something which I think is inherently unethical from the perspective of anticipation-for-emergence, because you're actually violating the openness of the future and the idea of gifting to the future, their right to have an open future, meaning not impose choices on them. But it doesn't deal with at all the question of how do we actually deal with that toxic waste? And do the kind of planning that a number of us know about from the point of view of setting up warning systems for people 30,000 years from now. But I think that even the way we pose the question about planning and what will people 30,000 years from now do when they encounter toxic waste is a long term way of thinking. And there again, I'm very, very skittish when it comes to this term, "long term", because I think, again, it invites us to colonize the future. And it invites us to do things which in fact, don't embed in our very ethical now, a legacy, which is not imposing, but creates the sensitivities, the openness, the creation of wisdom through experience, that would mean I trust people 30,000 years from now to not be stupid, and to be cautious, and to be also aware of the stupidity of the past generations. And as they make their choices then and there with what they know and what they can do and whether they care about and with their values. They'll do the right thing. In the same way that by the way -- I mean, this is a kind of maturity model -- I definitely trust my children, and I expect them to be able to work and create and be themselves without having to abide by something I've imposed on them. I think that their experiences and their ability to learn is what enables them to be in the here and now and to also act ethically in the present, and therefore leave for the future, the fact that they've done what they consider correct from an anticipatory perspective in the present.
John Sweeney
And this is where I think, you know, love as a term or as a framing, again, feels a lot more natural, and Riel, hearing you talk about that trust and that sense of, you know, embodied sort of understanding, or at least that, you know, gravity that that feels, I think love feels like a really appropriate framing there. And so I guess, then the question becomes, you know, where are the spaces or how to be able to create and foster and shape the emergence of that? And I think that, again, back to this sort of futures multiverse, right, if we're able to have communities where that can seem emergent, or, you know, you can't artificially construct that. So you know, allowing that to be serendipitously produced or created and co created, I think, is really the principles of a practice. And I say, practice, because I felt like over the last, you know, year, a lot of the folks that, talking to in the field, had that sense of empathy and that rawness of seeing what had emerged, and of course, being able to respond to discourse, but also that very visceral embodied sense of the crises and multiple crises and seeing it, of course, still unfold. And so being able to, again, own that and feel a sense of clarity around self, and then being able to position what that means for practice. And I think, you know, what's been interesting in some seeing some of these other conversations play out, is being able to hold that space of love and being able then to communicate and connect with others maybe. And then I don't know, also feeling as with Riel, like, if there's, I don't think there's a formula there, I think it seriously becomes more of a recipe, if anything, to be able to understand how to be able to enact and embody and to bring that to the practice.
Peter Hayward
Can I jump in just because I've been listening. It's a fascinating conversation. I'm just going to offer these and then step away again. I think it's an important point, I think Riel teased that out from Josh's point around agency, and so the preface that, are we talking about a new form of agency that allows for emergence, rather than an agency that narrows it or constrains it. And the second one that struck me just listening particularly to what John was saying, around love is, and I believe it was Kuhn who said there were no revolutions in paradigms that didn't follow funerals. In other words, thinking, thinking died with people. Paradigms died when people died. And what emerged after funerals was different thinking, I just want to kind of pose that notion that one aspect of emergence is actually a cycle of death and rebirth. And what would it look like if we actually, back to Riel's point, if we wanted to -- and what was the term Riel used with slavery? Was it we abolish it? Is there a process where we actually, in order for ideas to emerge, we actually have a funeral or services to actually effectively let ideas die?
Riel Miller
Fantastic -- I think, about both, you know, the introduction of the idea of love, and the idea of rituals that can enable beginnings and endings. Those are wonderful things. And I think that that's it, but it takes a lot of courage. And it takes a lot of confidence. And it takes a lot of solidarity to do that, particularly when, you know, we can think of a funeral for our quest for immortality, that would be would be a, really, a really big one, a funeral for our desire to control the future. And therefore a funeral in a sense for something as ubiquitous and powerful as bureaucracy. These are immense monuments, that tower over us, and that we don't even see. So I would be very keen to work with the community to think about it, but I have to admit that it would be radical, in a sense, and very, very challenging and very frightening. And I guess, in my own experience, I think you know, John, you know, we've definitely worked on this together, is that giving people a way to actually build the alternative first, before we bury the old is a gentler and maybe more nurturing gardening transitional strategy. But I don't know if it's doable, and I'm not entirely sure if the shock of burying something and putting an end to something isn't also very important, is one of the tactics that makes sense, if you're trying to think about transitions. Again, I'll say it, I've said it before, I have no idea what transformation is about, because I can't tell if what I'm doing that I think is transitionally open or agile or fluid or adaptable, will actually have durability, and actually contribute to what might be eventually called transformation. So I don't even know if the funeral, you know, it really means the end of something, or simply creates the basis for its resurrection, which, by the way, is something that's been used historically, to quite great effect. I think that this is a really fascinating conversation, particularly if we think about love as unbelievable multi dimensionality, and its obviously emergent character, from the point of view of experience, and the differences that we have, in terms of experiencing that. We've got a fantastic terrain to work on here. I'll end with the point, the following point, is that I think a lot of this is anchored in our ability to feel comfortable with difference, and not just with repetition, to make the generic general point. And that is the difference that involves the ending of things, the difference that involves trying to pay attention to something that's unfamiliar and novel, and in general, becoming better at difference. So here, I do have some sense of going back to the reading and writing out of language, that if we do become more able to understand anticipation, we can eventually become capable of integrating all of these elements in our way of being. But obviously, that's just a scenario and a fantasy.
John Sweeney
And two things come to mind quickly, I think as Peter, your question pulls out and as Riel's already, you know, hit on, you know, the problem is basically the things don't stay dead in this age of sort of zombies, they keep coming back. And Zia had a great point, actually a dead body has, there's a reason we put them in the ground. Disease doesn't stop just because it's dead, it can contaminate, and infect, and so it is precisely about finding a way to...I suppose we're back to the the nuclear waste example, in some ways, right? Disposal in a way that's healthy...but also, you know, funerals aren't for the dead at all, there's the kind of sanitary health aspect. The funerals are for the living, there is this process of letting go. So I love the ritual aspect. And as this relates to love, I think in the moments that maybe you know, have occurred where folks have been a bit stuck, there has been an invocation of a more embodied relationality. So you know, I have had opportunities to say to folks, Okay, tell me about your kids, your nieces or nephews. So locating it within a love, let's say, nexus or love relationality, allowed for a little bit of a step outside of that other kind of pathology. And I think that, again, from a practice perspective, how do we allow ourselves to hold those raw spaces, and certainly I think about my own experience and training, you know, what enables us to feel comfortable or to feel confident to be able to enter those spaces? And also, again, from a practice perspective, what does that bring to us? I mean, because, again, I've mentioned to others feeling that sort of empathy and that openness, and what does that mean and look like? And that's not what I think a lot of the training enables, right? So how do you enable that, and I think it's back to this community piece, and being able to foster that as something that is about you know, your own journey as a practitioner, but also as someone who, who wants to, you know, enable and allow that to be the emergent property to come out of those experiences.
Joshua Floyd
It occurs to me, too, that the honoring and commemorating of our dead paradigms, monsters, is also a part of bringing them into an ongoing living, emergent tradition. And I was thinking about this in relation to, Riel, your point about how you would like to equip your children without dictating to them, how they should continue, how they should go on. And I think part of that obligation to our children is also to leave them with or to bring them into a living tradition, that gives them something that they feel that they want to take forward with their new and novel contributions, their new directions, their new interpretations. By honoring our monsters, it seems to me that we will equip those generations beyond us, perhaps better for bringing that past into what emerges going forward in a way that perhaps addresses that point of John's about the, the potential zombie nature of our past monsters.
Riel Miller
Josh, I think you're right, you know, Bayo Akomolafe, who wrote "These Wilds Beyond our Fences", Bayo talks a lot about these kinds of issues and the monsters and how we relate to them, and also how honoring is not necessarily perpetuating. And so I think I really like the conversation because it's opening up. I mean, I'm learning a lot here about one of the things that preoccupies me all the time, which is building bridges. In other words, if I'm trying to cross boundaries, you know, let's say, a river or a chasm, or whatever, if I'm trying to cross a boundary, I want to build a bridge or a gateway or something like that. The work that I've tried to do on futures literacy and anticipatory systems, and the framework and stuff like that, and the book that came out in 2018, are really about trying to invite a world -- and here I'll talk about the technocratic world -- that's very, very hesitant, or I would say opposed, and also incapable, of overcoming the divide between analysis and emotion, the old, somewhat cliche, Cartesian split. But...and I really hesitate because the bridge contaminates. In other words, the bridge carries with it contamination. And I don't understand exactly how that contamination will work, because I don't know, you know, can't know, the future, I can't even see a lot of it. So in some senses, I wonder if we don't end up with the kind of injunction, kind of Star Trek, of not contaminating other sentient beings with a need to create a break. So I worry at times that when I talk about abolishing it really does mean creating a break, and in some ways, not building bridges. So that means not thinking about transition, other than to say that enabling a real transition is to really cease and desist in some form of definitive way. And now, I think that we can still sustain honor in that context, because what we're saying, essentially, is that the only way to create a new opening is to create a new opening. Is to is to make that break happen. And just to finish on this point, bequeathing laws, bequeathing rules, commandments, bequeathing statues and the shoulders of giants to stand on, bequeathing all of that looks generous, looks wise, looks like the accumulation of knowledge and passing it along. But I think that there's probably a much more modest version of this for a species that just has a good life, and finds meaning in life, as a species that inhabits Planet Earth, it does not go into space, and it does not conquer the universe, and it does not conquer each other. And it's not glorious in any way, shape, or form. It's just good to be alive. And so we're really grappling with some really crucial issues about where we sit today, and how, as people exploring anticipatory systems, we understand what we're doing, and how we try and gift it to others. So I appreciate this conversation a great deal. Thank you.
John Sweeney
And I think just one last thing to add, I think that, you know, Riel's point about how do we...how do we decenter the human and find better ways for talking and thinking about the kinds of different models and modes of how different species and organisms, you know, utilize anticipatory systems and find ways of thinking and being that don't continuously lapse us back into this, this Anthropocene, which arguably, is meant to, of course, you know, reflect on a collection of activities that have produced what is a climate emergency, but also invariably might choose to reinforce a certain mode of agency that is in and of itself, the problem. And I suppose it was also that -- back to this broader question that Josh brought up around sort of, where does this issue lie -- I always struggled with this idea that, I think it was Margaret Mead that said, you know, civilization occurred in the moment where we discovered -- the back to the grave -- the the healed femur, right, that someone had cared for another, had taken, you know, the time to be with them, you know, that had been applied. And so locating healing within that space, and I guess there's some value in thinking through that, but you know, lots of other organism organisms and species show a level of care and a level of love that I think, that example was meant to draw out. So I think I'm increasingly becoming comfortable with the idea of decentering the human and of course, you know, the aim, as we all know, is to also decenter certain modes of understanding and relying on forms of wisdom that have been existent for millennia across a variety of traditions such that we're able to, you know, hear that and enact that and embody that, and certainly, I can't -- bringing this back to practice -- separate my own practice and my own awareness of that, from the time spent in Hawaii and as a guest of Native Hawaiian culture. And so to be able to see how those different understandings infuse, the kinds of practices that emerge, I think, is also critical and to see the field really reveal itself and to be able to confront the legacies of coloniality that have perpetuated a variety of forms of anticipation-for-the-future and the kind of pathologies around that, to see that being confronted in new ways, and of course, seeing that confronted previously and seeing this reemerge strongly now, I think it's long overdue and affirming and something that I think also speaks to these broader questions that are being teased out.
Riel Miller
Just quickly, John, to pick up on the practice side, because it's really...we're designers and practitioners and facilitators and enablers in a lot of the work that we do with people in the field. You know, it's really rare for me, it almost never happens, to talk about love, for instance, in the context of initiating or co-designing or engaging in a process. But of course, when I think about it, I know that it's something that gets designed in because of the consideration. You know, your kind of, the Margaret Mead caring for the other, is that the consideration and caring for the other is something that gets built into the design, gets built into the process, gets built into the heuristics. And the same goes I think, in so far as we're beginning to really be able to grasp this, for the terrible damage done in the past, the scars and the pain that people carry with them. But also the possibility, which we can all grasp, to be capable of being free. In other words, finding ways to mutually support each other's liberation. That is not about scale economies, and making sure that everybody has enough calories, which is a mechanistic approach that leads to, that's part and parcel of, growth and progress, but really allows us to open up space where we can explore the unknown together. And I think that there's a really potentially powerful, and I hope, something that's being built up. So for me a weak signal within our profession, within our practice, that nourishes this non-totalizing, non-equivalent way of negotiating meaning. In other words, we create spaces in which we can build together strange attractors, that allow us to engage with something as powerful and as meaningful as the future, as you know, the source of fear and hope. But that really doesn't impose on the other, but invites and exchanges and shares in a way that really leaves you and your community and the relationships that you have as uninvaded as possible. Again, thinking back to the Star Trek, you know, first, don't don't interfere with a sentient civilization. If we can get there, I think we're building up the seeds or elements of something that might grow. Of course, no idea whether it will or whether it will be better than anything we could have imagined otherwise. But at least to me, those seem like components of what might be a different way of being. So another paradigm. So yeah, I really like this.
Joshua Floyd
Yeah, this idea of invitation has particular resonance for me, I'm thinking in a past life, my first career was in engineering. And so I worked amongst and was one of those who took grand plans and brought them to fruition. I know what it feels like to do that, and to feel that that is a really important, valuable, worthy, worthwhile contribution to make. And a question that arose for me in thinking about this conversation today: How is it that I can connect an appreciation from where I sit now for the exploration of anticipation-for-emergence with those who see their greatest duty and gift to the world being to perpetuate the plans that they understand to be in that greater collective interest, improving material collective conditions for those who they see as materially deprived and so forth. And I have a sense that the idea of, or the, the gift of invitation is a way into this, a way to somehow dissolve the dilemma that this presents me with. In the first conversation, John, you made a couple of references to the infinite game. And I knew that Peter had particularly appreciated I think James Carse's book, "Finite and Infinite Games", and I knew a bit about it, but I had never read it. So as a prompt from that first conversation, I got hold of a copy, and I've been reading it and I just finished it this evening, before the conversation. There's a paragraph that I found in it, just this evening, that is remarkable in how it speaks to so many of the themes that we've touched on here, and I wonder if I could just read it out to you. It's in Section 88: "A garden is a place where growth is found, it has its own source of change, one does not bring change to a garden, but comes to a garden prepared for change, and therefore prepared to change. It is possible to deal with growth only out of growth. True parents do not see to it that their children grow in a particular way, according to a preferred pattern or scripted stages. But they see to it that they grow with their children. The character of one's parenting, if it is genuinely dramatic, must be constantly altered from within as the children change from within. So too, with teaching or working with or loving each other."
Riel Miller
Spot on.
John Sweeney
Wow.
Peter Hayward
Yeah. On behalf of the Futurepod community, thanks to the three of you for taking some time out to explore this. Thank you, Josh, for the questions. And thanks to Riel and John to agree to come back and to reopen the wound so to speak. I think when this goes out to the community, I'll talk it over with the other Futurepod people, but my thought will be to put an invitation if people want to come back and hear more or want to ask questions or want to make points. But I think this notion of an open invitation based on the conversation that we've had, I think seems to be a useful next step.
Riel Miller
Count me, I felt that, just to thank all of you. I mean, I think we're moving, you know, we're moving the conversation forward, it advances through crucial issues, and it adds value to the conversation, to what we understand, to what we're...you know, to what we can use. And and I have to say, I mean, I'm grateful...because like I mentioned at the beginning, I've had to reflect and continue to reflect on these conversations, and use them in my work. So this is definitely something that seems to me to be a work in progress.
John Sweeney
Yeah, I would love to keep the conversation going. And absolutely so appreciative of the opportunity to connect and yeah, this is a..it's the best funeral that I've been to. So yeah, great stuff.
Joshua Floyd
Yeah, this is the essence of futures practice for me, as I understand it, so yeah, count me in.
Peter Hayward
This has been another production from Futurepod. Futurepod is a not for profit venture. We exist through the generosity of our supporters. If you would like to support Futurepod, go to the Patreon link on our website. Thank you for listening. Remember to follow us on Instagram and Facebook. This is Peter Hayward saying goodbye for now.