A new dawn!

A missing piece in understanding where we are and where we need to go

A new book, The Dawn of Everything, sheds light on how throughout human pre-history, human people had the capacity to re-think – re-imagine – social arrangements and then enact new arrangements to ensure that their human needs were met, within the constraints of their environment.

To do this requires a mature fourth-person perspective, an ability to understand the context in which social arrangements (first-, second- and third-person perspectives) are framed and then to modify this context to allow new arrangements.

The book’s authors posit that the most important question for modern humans is to ask why are we stuck?  How come we allow a small number of people to determine the fate of everyone else (and the planet itself) and who are doing it rather badly?

Put simply, very few adults have developed to have a fourth-person perspective .As I show in Why We Teach, our schooling systems were designed to support early and mature second-person perspectives and the mature third-person perspective only emerged widely in adult society from the 1980’s. An early fourth-person perspective has only recently begun to emerge amongst managers in organisations, in the last decade or two.

The Dawn of Everything - David Graeber and David Wengrow

This evidence that the typical adult forager had a fourth-person perspective further supports my view that, left unconstrained, young people would develop this capability by their mid-twenties (and I know several who are verifiably at that level now).

For adults who have been constrained in this area of development (as most of us have), it is slow and difficult to expand our perspective to this level.  If we are to get unstuck, we need to allow young people to freely develop in this area and to lead the way.

This reflects Margaret Mead’s proposal about our being in a prefigurative society where it is young people who represent what is to come (see my post here).

This links the transformation of education directly to the unsticking of our political systems, and that in turn will allow us to address the existential issues of our age (climate change, inequality, nuclear conflict, Big Tech, etc.).

It is so important to transform our education systems so our young people can develop fully, beyond where most adults are now, and accelerate the transformation of our society away from the abyss and into a sustainable future.

Happy 2022!

 

 John Corrigan is an expert in helping individuals to bring their whole of mind to their daily life and increase their effectiveness and the effectiveness of those around them. This expertise scales from the individual to the team to the organisation. At the core of this work is the practice of encounter.  Earlier blogs can be found here.

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