6 tweets · February 2019 · 5 likes · 0 retweets · read on Twitter
Replying to @cosimia_
@cosimia_ Structure of society. @DavidDeutschOxf outlines this brilliantly in some of the last chapters of his book The Beginning of Infinity. Human prehistory is a story of increasingly powerful creativity being used to maintain totally static societies. amzn.to/2BUGmPC
@cosimia_ @DavidDeutschOxf This emerged evolutionarily because it was an attractor: once your society forces you to not innovate, your society stays static because nobody has the space to experiment & change it into a dynamic society. And, unfortunately, this required repression of human desire.
@cosimia_ @DavidDeutschOxf My model (building on DD's) is that for some more recent period, it's been even worse. Previously there was a narrow range of okay behaviors. Might suck but at least you can do it. Then there started to be double-binds: conflicting demands that you can't meet all at once.
@cosimia_ @DavidDeutschOxf DD describes how the Enlightenment began a shift to a dynamic society that updates its shared beliefs and practices (ie memes) based on what works and holds up under reflection, rather than insisting that they not change under any circumstances.
@cosimia_ @DavidDeutschOxf My model is that this situation has made the double-binds even more messy, because people are trying to use the old mode of thinking to install the new one. eg "I shouldn't say "should"." (I'm full-time in a social lab oriented to how to train this thinking/culture shift.)
@cosimia_ @DavidDeutschOxf Or "you should think independently". Or trying to train children to be creative in environments that systematically destroy creativity. Double-binds are crazy-making, and so while this is getting better in some places, it's getting worse in others.