Finding Collective Capacities

Posted on January 16, 2007 by Dave Pollard

If we’re going to save the world and stuff, we’re going to need to bring some diverse skills and capacities to bear. The two models above, which come from these posts last year, suggest what these needed skills and capacities might be.

The problem is, we tend to gravitate towards like minds, people who think like we do, have the values we have, and to some extent have developed the skills and capacities we have. That doesn’t bode well for diversity.

The Jungian model of knowledge identifies four orientations for learning, understanding and seeing the world:

sensual (through the senses),
emotional (through the heart),
intellectual (through the mind) and
instinctual (through the body/genes)

None of us is purely aligned with any one of these four orientations, but most of us lean towards one or two. Hedonists lean to the sensual, artists to the sensual and emotional, philosophers to the emotional and intellectual, scientists to the sensual and intellectual, primitivists to the instinctual, naturalists to the sensual and instinctual. As a lifelong philosopher, the intellectual and the emotional orientations (in that order) remain my fortÈ, though as I’ve grown older I’ve refocused on the sensual and the instinctual, though I remain poor at learning and seeing the world through these orientations.

We need the artists to help us imagine and perceive and create, the scientists to help us understand and realize, the naturalists and the hedonists to keep us joyful and connected, and the philosophers to help make sense of it all.

If you were to look at the collective capacities of those in my communities, or at least, say, the 150 I am closest to and love the most, you’d find a decided lack of diversity: too many philosophers and not enough artists, too many scientists and not enough intuiters, too many dreamers and not enough pragmatists, and far too many disconnected from their senses and instincts and the Earth, and (the males especially) disconnected from their emotions as well, living inside their heads and in their dreamworlds. Or, as Neil Young put it, living in our sleep. If I were not very careful, my ideal Intentional Community would be, collectively, brilliant and imaginative and utterly incompetent at living in the real world.

I am strongly attracted to artists and hedonists and naturalists, but I tend to drive them to distraction with my inability to see the world the way they do, despite extraordinary efforts. My relationships with them tend to be fiery and short-lived.

Here’s a very rough and highly judgemental mapping from the four Jungian orientations to some of the capacities we need:

sensual	emotional	intellectual	instinctual	all four (in different ways)
sensing	letting-self-open	making sense	letting-self-open	learning
focusing attention	conversing	imagining	intuiting	understanding
playing	collaborating	conversing	trying	appreciating
telling stories	letting-self-believe	interpreting	experimenting	contextualizing
showing	intending	creating models	synthesizing	provoking
entertaining	entertaining	integrating (consc.)	deciding	adding insight
letting emerge	offering	questioning	letting emerge	letting-self-change
reflecting	reflecting	facilitating	integrating (unconsc.)	following through
perceiving	loving	realizing	reacting	relating

none are particularly good at capacities needing patience: suspending, letting come/go, seeing other perspectives

So as someone with (if I were to be honest with myself) a primary intellectual orientation and a secondary emotional orientation, I think I’m pretty good at the capacities in the blue and white columns, so-so at the capacities in the pink column, and still awful at the capacities in the yellow and green columns. What’s worse, appreciating capacities we lack doesn’t make it any easier to acquire them.

I don’t know enough artists and hedonists and naturalists, but more than that, I don’t know how to love them and get them to love me well enough to live with them in Intentional Communities and make a living with them in Natural Enterprises. I just keep gravitating to others of the same orientations and away from those with different orientations, and these tendencies seem to be mutual. It’s just easier and more fun to spend time and love and work with people who ‘get’ you, who you ‘get’ too.

How does this work in indigenous cultures? Are they just more tolerant or more well-rounded in their capacities? Or when it comes to love, does chemistry finally trump everything else? And if not, what can we do to find, and keep together, people of different orientations and diverse skills, to build Intentional Communities and Natural Enterprises thatare collectively competent and resilient?

Category: Building a Community-Based Society

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5 Responses to Finding Collective Capacities

Skywind says:

January 16, 2007 at 22:36

“I just keep gravitating to others of the same orientations and away from those with different orientations, and these tendencies seem to be mutual.”I have experienced an intentional community where this tendency was overcome (at least for me and it appeared for some others). It was facilitated by community sharing / discussion circles, but also by direct experience: invitation by the leaders to “take a look at who’s here with you; look into their eyes, look around and see your community.” I was surprised at first how hard it was for me to regularly make eye contact – and this was with people I wanted to consider as friends. But the experience of standing there, looking at each other, seeing and being seen, and other community rituals (a spiral dance, or taking hands and forming a circle, or any of a number of activities) brought me out of my head and into my body WITH my community.I enjoy sensual living – a nude swim in a cool creek on a hot August evening sounds like heaven. But I can’t get to that experience from the same internal mind-heart space that takes me to conversational connection. The community I spend time with facilitates that shift through experiential activities; drumming or rhythm instruments, singing, walking, touching hands, invitations to see, to listen, to smell, to stretch and wiggle and move. Back when I was a child these things came naturally, and then school and ‘adult formalities’ conditioned me to sit still, shut up, quit wiggling, behave, don’t laugh too loudly, don’t be Too Much. Don’t be WILD. I am primarily a kinesthetic learner, and “they” took away my primary way to be happy in the world; I’ve found my way back to it, though, over time. Mostly, I’ve found that talking doesn’t take me there, but doing, touching, dancing, drumming… can. And just as importantly, it can give me a different mode of experiencing connection with other people. I don’t have to dance alone.
MLU says:

January 16, 2007 at 23:11

I think your preference for being with people who are more like you is probably just honesty–maybe a step along the way to seeing what’s wrong with “diversity” as a social ideal.In the presence of [ethnic] diversity, we hunker down. We act like turtles. The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it
Derek says:

January 17, 2007 at 19:35

I find that I capture more of the skills outside my own regular circle when I drop my own goals and focus on helping others accomplish their goals. this mostly happens in class when I’m teaching others how to make stuff. I focus on helping the students realize their ideas without mine getting in the way. probably hard to do for people that are trying to change the world.
Flemming Funch says:

January 24, 2007 at 14:52

Hm, yeah, it is kind of a problem if we want to change the world. I really appreciate diversity and that there are people who’re different from myself, and sometimes I very much enjoy their company. But it isn’t always the kinds of people I’d attract. I’d tend to attract the people who’re similar to me. And if we actually needed to do something tangible together, that might not be such a good idea.I left some comments on this subject in my last couple of posts on my blog today. (I seemed to have trouble posting the URLs here)
Cav Edwards says:

July 5, 2007 at 09:50

Your graph, on the left in Finding Collective Capacities is very reminiscent of another feedback loop.This one called MAPE, Measure, Analyse, Plan, Execute. IBM originated MAPE to use in autonomic computing. The idea being the analyse part was to be a rule engine that would drive changing values into a machine’s configuration in case its environment changed and it needed to change with it.The exact same reasons were cited, coping with complexity, but in computing systems.Its a powerful concept that can be implemented. There is no reason why a rules engine has to be used. Search algorithms can be swapped in to search for a ‘next best solution’ instead.I have this feeling deep down that we are on the cusp of what I have termed Knowledge Convergence, Einsteinian Grand Unification. As we all plough the depths of understanding of our respective fields of knowledge we discover an interconnectedness.I cant even claim originality here though, since Fritjof Kapra has captured this philosophy in Web of Life, Uncommon Wisdom, the Tao of Physics and others. Robert Anton Wilson has captured this in Quantum Psychology.The fact that this convergence is taking place at all means we are living in a very exciting age.