My series of 20 short videos The Shared Center: Awakening our Better Angels launched on Thursday. Here are the first three videos (with a link beneath each to ‘Talking it through’, conversations with Irish comedian and fine specimen of a human Colm O’Regan about the ideas behind each of the videos.
Here’s the website for the project with the YouTube playlist here. The plan is to release at least one each week until they’re finished.
Please help me get the word out by sharing.
Two years in the making, the videos seek to present a book’s worth of ideas, but in a more accessible and contemporary format. They explore two related ideas:
1. Elections represent the people. So do lotteries – as used in juries.
In framing politics as a contest, elections build polarisation, culture-war and misinformation into the institutional DNA of our political system, increasingly marginalising open dialogue and even genuine persuasion.
Juries frame politics as dialogue and solving problems in ways most of us can live with.
We’ve entrenched them in our judicial branch for centuries. We must begin building them into our political system – as Michigan has with its Independent Citizens’ Redistricting Commission and Belgium has with standing citizen assemblies and parliamentary committees involving citizens chosen by lottery.
2. Open competition – for political office or for promotion within organisations - centres leadership around self-interest and self-assertion.
Leaving other human capabilities and virtues unrewarded – listening to, involving and considering others.
The alternative is ‘bottom-up meritocracy’. It delivered widely celebrated stability and competence to Venice’s republic for five hundred years and governs Wikipedia today.
After watching the second video, about teamwork, I was reminded of the book "Survival of the Friendliest" by Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods.
You may have already read it, but in case not:
Here is a quote from the book's description:
"Since Charles Darwin wrote about "evolutionary fitness," the idea of fitness has been confused with physical strength, tactical brilliance, and aggression. In fact, what made us evolutionarily fit was a remarkable kind of friendliness, a virtuosic ability to coordinate and communicate with others that allowed us to achieve all the cultural and technical marvels in human history. Advancing what they call the "self-domestication theory," Brian Hare, professor in the department of evolutionary anthropology and the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke University and his wife, Vanessa Woods, a research scientist and award-winning journalist, shed light on the mysterious leap in human cognition that allowed Homo sapiens to thrive."
You can read more about the book here: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/48635421-survival-of-the-friendliest