RTE Roundtable Talk #15: The Red Herring

Featuring Matthew Evans-Cockle and Tessa Lena

Mathew Crawford

6 min ago

"It is not more bigness that should be our goal. We must attempt, rather, to bring people back to the warmth of community, to the worth of individual effort and responsibility, and of individuals working together as a community, to better their lives and their children's future." -Robert F. Kennedy

I loved today's roundtable because it gets at the heart of why I stepped away from my vocation to organize thoughts and project messages that I felt could be productive in the face of something (or somethings) that seemed to be going very wrong during the pandemic.

I'll mention that I had less understanding of where this talk was going than previous discussions. While I organize most of the roundtable discussions, this was one of the ones Liam organized. And lately I've been so busy that I was largely unprepared, except that the name of the topic lent itself to possible discussions of geopolitics and war. But the conversation went in a different direction, and one that I find more fundamentally important. That is a credit to our two excellent guests, Matthew Evans-Cockle and Tessa Lena.

https://rumble.com/v1nflp4-the-red-herring-round-table-with-matthew-evans-cockle-and-tessa-lena.html

You can also view the discussion on YouTube.

The discussion included historical perspectives on religions and ideologies, and the ways in which they are coopted by those who organize games of dominance.

We also discussed problem identification and solutions. I think we are still in the problem identification phase in which many people are waking up from a sort of hypnosis ingrained in their educations and coerced societal formation. Ultimately, each individual must live their own journey, then come together in networks or even networks of networks, strong enough to resist the coercive powers of the few high level controllers of world domination games.

Many people wonder whether there is hope in the struggle, and I feel certain that there is. Metcalf's law is a powerful model for network power. When the network is twice is large, the power level grows by a factor of 4. When the network is a hundred times as large, the power of the network is 10,000-fold. A network of individuals exercising their agency as personal locus of control need not be pushed around by the gaming of otherwise productive exercises of philosophy, religion, or ideology—all of which get gamed in context and labeling by those seeking control.

The conversation definitely had a building stage, and that is at least due to the fact that all of us recognized that words in all of the social domains that represent group formation and dynamics are games in complex ways. I think that we each pushed around the walls of that maze while climbing a challenging mountain.

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Source: Rounding the Earth Newsletter