Last week I brought together the ideas that for us to get unstuck (politically) we need many more adults with the capacity to reimagine and enact new social and economic arrangements (a fourth-person perspective) and, that left unconstrained, young people would reach this level of capability by their mid-twenties, surpassing most current adults.

At the same time, society still needs continuity in its technologies and institutions – there is still a need for electricians and engineers, doctors and nurses, beauticians and train drivers. There is still the need for transmission from adult to child in the sense of knowledge and skills, but the transmission from child to adult is to afford the capacity to question the validity of current social and economic arrangements, and the modelling of new identities that are suited to an emerging new world.

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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.

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Of the four ways of knowing participatory and perspectival knowing seem the most complex and hardest to develop, but this is where children start. A baby participates deeply with its world, initially in identification with it, only gradually differentiating itself and developing its own perspective with unvarnished views of what is important and what not.

Procedural knowing begins to become important about the time that a child is ready to attend school but very much in the sense of how she should behave to have friends, to communicate with others by writing, singing, drawing, how she should behave to develop.

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I talk a lot about unconditional love (agape – the love that forms a person) as the practice of paying full attention to another (i.e., using sustained attention) and then, no matter what the person says or does, responding with kindness and compassion, in their best interest.

Implied in this practice (and explicitly in the Christian definition) is the concept of sacrifice. Our baby wakes and cries in the middle of the night and we give up our sleep to comfort them. Your partner wants to do X and you want to do Y, so you give up Y to be with them in what they want to do.

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