Revision as of 14:45, 17 January 2020

Think about the social reality in Galilei’s time. The people who had “royal blood” or “blue blood” were destined to rule over others. The kings were crowned by the Church, so they drew the legitimacy of their absolute power directly from God. Today we may laugh at such nonsense. But to the people back then, that was the reality they lived in.

Isn’t it just obvious that every human society had or has its own “reality”, which its members considered as the reality? Why should we be an exception? Bourdieu, and the giants on whose shoulders he stood, called this phenomenon (that the people in a society consider their reality picture as the only one that’s possible) doxa.

Bourdieu explained with exceptional clearly and thoroughness the phenomenology of social reality construction. How such “realities” are transmitted from body to body directly, in ways that bypass the conscious mind. Bourdieu also explained how the power relationships in a society are created and maintained in that way. The king enters the room, and everyone bows. Naturally, you bow too. And even if you may not feel like bowing, something in you knows that if you don’t bow down your head, you may lose it.

The king has his own habitus (embodied and socially sanctioned patterns of behavior); and you have yours. Socialization is to a large degree the way in which human societies and cultures operate. It’s how everyone gets “put into his place” (or habitus).

— We may now see such ritualized modes of acting and feeling as ways to ‘program’ our embodied cognitive filters? We may model socialization as setting up the boundary conditions in our embodied ‘neural networks’? We may use Raković’s model as a biophysical model of our socialized reality and its construction?

Yes, we may, indeed.

— But that changes everything! Our understanding of justice and power, our legal and ethical norms, our institutions, our very democracy – isn’t all this created with the idea that we the people make rational and conscious choices…?

In our knowledge federation prototype we modeled the intuitive notions “power holder” and “political enemy” as the power structure, to develop some of the consequences of this insight.

— I know that The Paradigm Strategy poster, which is discussed in Federation through Conversations, federates Bourdieu’s and Damasio’s work with a variety of other insights, to reach that pivotal insight leading to worldview change. And to the “change of course”. I wonder, before we continue, if you would like to share one of those insights, to strengthen the important point we have just reached?

There is a vignette I have not yet told anywhere, which may bring home some of the important points quite perfectly. It’s about Sergei Chakhotin,

• Bullet points
• In five insights you can see the other five insights, and some comments about their relationships.