IS: On movements
Upcoming open events:
- Friday, Apr 19: Open-to-all Office Hours
- Saturday, Apr 27: Exploratory Series session #2 — Dia-Logos with Romeck van Zeijl (2 hours)
all start @ 1pm Pacific Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC). Core Calls on Sundays for members run every week through June 23.
Now available: 27m recording of the teaching content from the "Growth as Object" session last Saturday.
Here's a teaser for Exploratory #2, not this Saturday but the following, the practice of Dia-Logos inspired by Guy Sengstock and John Vervaeke. Says Romeck, "It is a way of walking into the unknown together with all our senses wide open" and "it can turn a conversation into a kind of improvised jazz. You "listen into the dark" together, open yourself to the possibility of letting some greater Intelligence speak through you"
On movements
Is it time to start building a movement? In the afterglow of Limicon, I've been slowly warming up to the idea, and seeing some energy in the wider Liminal Web scene towards making a start of it. Perhaps we have enough coherence, enough interconnection, and enough capacity to raise that kind of flag. But what do I even mean by "movement" and why would we want to participate in one?
A "Liminal Web scene" pretty definitely exists at this point. You could call it a small subculture, one that positions itself on the line of cultural evolution. To start using the word "movement" commonly points toward the collective having a goal or direction of some sort. Maybe like the US civil rights movement, collective action towards change? But we also talk of emergent movements, like the Renaissance, that seem to happen at a subtler layer of action.
Yes, much like our use of the word "society" in IS, there is a small and large meaning to "movement". Perhaps this, too, is a useful confusion. In the small, it's the points-of-deliberate-contact between a scene with a new culture and the existing culture surrounding it. In the large, it's a transformation of humanity on the scale of modernity emerging as the successor to traditionalism.
A movement is more legible than a scene. A movement is broad and open. A movement is a cascade of shifting norms. A movement rallies people to its cause. A movement is powerful in and through its numbers. A movement has many leaders, and is leaderless. A movement is sometimes co-opted or hijacked.
To amplify or "build" a movement is to wield a double-edged sword. (many things are, of course) It can attract supporters and participants, putting up a flag to let the others find you and accelerating beneficial change. That same flag can attract dilution and exploitation, and outright opponents. The recent Effective Altruism movement serves as a useful case study of both sides.
To declare a movement, make it legible and promote it, produces... aha, perhaps it produces counter-reaction from the world corresponding to the degree that movement is perceived as pushing on existing interests and power structures. But it hardly seems possible to avoid many downsides by avoiding legibility — the reward for staying under the radar longer is that your subculture just gets named from the outside by the first reporter to cover the existence of your growing influence as a hit piece for clicks.
Awareness makes everything better, as a reliable rule of thumb, and I imagine that's true of movement-building as well. I haven't even touched (today) on how IS would relate to being a part of a nascent movement-building effort — the pace of inner development doesn't seem very compatible with a viral/memetic type movement, but a "slow movement" would still be faster than no intentional movement-building. Perhaps IS can bring some post-conventional awareness to the table in holding a meta-aware movement for the greater good.
Cheers,
James