Radical Futures: Foundations for a Better World will not explore solutions, since solutions already exist. Instead, it will ask: what are the conditions we must create for humanity to change and adapt? What foundations, what values and beliefs, could be at the heart of a better society? In the first part of this podcast, we lean in closer on six foundations suggested by members and friends of the B21 community: communication, multiplicity, balance, flexibility, regeneration, and creativity. We discuss the differences between these foundational principles and their implications on a larger-scale, only to let the listener decide which foundations are compelling enough to pursue.

With Claudia Raihert and Viola Ruzzier

Episode Transcript:

Introduction: This is not a race against the machines. This is a race with the machines. From quantum physics to poetry, from neuroscience to geography, from philosophy to immersive realities, Building 21 is a space where one can explore, play with, manipulate, bend, break, and probe the multifaceted dimensions of ideas, knowledge, and thinking. 

This episode is called Radical Futures, The Foundations for a Better World (part 1), with Claudia Raihert and Viola Ruzzier. 

Claudia: Hello everyone and welcome to this new Building 21 podcast. This one is from the Radical Futures Talks, a series of discussions we host here at Building 21, which help us reappropriate our future and its mutability – that is, the fact that the future doesn't exist and that we can therefore shape it. And we recently thought that a good way to do that this winter could be to question and suggest foundational principles that could be at the heart of a better society. It is Viola and Claudia here in the studio today, and together for you, we're going to go over the latest thought developments on this topic that have happened over the last weeks here at B21. Viola, before we start, would you like to say a word or two about yourself? 

Viola: Yes, hello. I'm Viola. I recently graduated from a BA in anthropology and biology, and I'm now program assistant here at Building 21. 

Claudia: And I'm Claudia. I recently graduated with a Master's in linguistics, and I am also a program assistant currently at Building 21. So far this winter, we've had two talks in the Radical Future series. The first talk, which happened in mid-February, asked: what are the foundations for a better world? And then, more recently, the second talk was supposed to delve into how the foundations of a better world can be spread. But even the second talk continued kind of discussing these questions under the new title, Creating the Next Mind Shift, which was really just big words to paraphrase the relevance of foundations. Yes, when we speak of foundations, we're referring to the foundational principles and beliefs that make up our imagined order, so to speak, that is, the framework of reference everyone abides by, which accounts for the rules, norms, and behaviours that structure our societies, but also for more personal things like our desires and perhaps thought patterns. Imagined order is a term I'm borrowing from Harari, by the way, who wrote a book called Sapiens on the history of humanity. 

Viola: Yeah, it's a very interesting point, because the foundations behind our laws shape laws and societal norms and everything enormously. So laws from ancient Mesopotamia are very different from the US Constitution, for example. And a big part of that is what values and what ideas we hold dearest, and which ones were most important, and therefore worth shaping our society with. 

Claudia: Yeah, that's very true. So for instance, for Mesopotamians, social class was extremely important, and that was used to regulate the type of punishment that different peoples would get, whereas in the American Constitution, every human being is said to be equal. 

Viola: That was at least the idea, was that everyone was human, and then obviously the practice was very different. And the foundations that the American Constitution was based on were so present in society that there wasn't even a need to specify them in the Constitution. So the idea that, for example, men or white people were superior to everyone else was so foundational that there was no need to mention it specifically. 

Claudia: Yeah, that's very, very true, and it also points to the fact that we don't need to change our laws, but more our beliefs about the world, the things we value, and try to agree on maybe a set of things that is as beneficial as possible, both for our generation and future ones. So this podcast is going to be divided into two parts. In the first part we're going to introduce the different foundational principles that have been suggested, their revisions, and the strands of reflection that are related to that, and in the second part, we're going to lean in closer on one of these suggested foundations, namely spirituality, which has sparked a lot of interest among the people that were present at the talks. 

Viola: Yes, so for, or after the first talk, five main foundations kind of emerged from the discussion. One of those was communication, which I think is a particularly interesting one. 

Claudia: Would you like to recall, Viola, how this one came about? 

Viola: Yes, so one of our guest speakers at the talk was Jill, and she suggested that education should be one of the foundational principles. But this was a bit of a point of contention, because for some of the people, namely Ollivier, who is the co-founder of Building 21, communication isn't a foundation, so much as it is a result of the foundations. So once you have your society with all its foundations and with all its laws and everything, then education is the tool through which you transmit these ideas and these foundations. And so his argument, and I think I agree, is that education in and of itself can't really be one of the founding principles if it's kind of the end result. It's how you spread all of the ideas that come first. And so kind of to make up – or not to make up for that, but in order to maintain the ideas that I think Jill was trying to express through education being one of the principles, we kind of tossed around a few ideas. And finally, I think we landed on the term communication, which still implies, you know, access to information for everyone and making sure that the flow of ideas and information is uninterrupted. And a lot of people seem to resonate very strongly with the idea of communication being one of the pillars of future society. 

Claudia: Yes, because in a way what we were valuing in education was exactly what Viola mentioned: access to information and also the value of learning and changing. And learning happens not only in humans, but also in animals and other living beings, as Viola made clear for us during the talk. And it's also the soundest way of growing. So it is still contentious whether communication can capture all of these ideas. But there was also trust that was a suggested alternative, and knowledge transfer. We are still not sure what to call it, but we at least temporarily settled on communication because it implies maybe valuing the effort of trying to be on the same page with someone, but also the effort to try to convey useful information. 

Viola: And actually this, you know, what exactly communication means also shows that things like a lot of media today, or especially advertisements don't really fall under communication, and of itself the idea isn't so much the transfer of ideas back and forth, but more trying to impose certain ideas, certain concepts into people's minds with no expectation or even desire to get anything back from the people that you're quote-on-quote communicating with. 

Claudia: Yeah, exactly. But this leads us to a second foundation which we've suggested. Actually this one came from Ollivier Dyens, and it's multiplicity. 

Viola: Yeah, so multiplicity entails a lot of things, it's a pretty interesting one too. So for example, it can mean allowing for complexity to exist and emerge, celebrating differences, you know, appreciating a multitude of opinions and ideas. 

Claudia: Yeah, and it also entails allowing for a multitude of interests to exist in the world, and by consequence not trying to force our own interests onto others. If we accept and value multiplicity, we can't have dictators, for example. 

Viola: Right, and we can't have corporate interests or anything else where there's only one source of ideas that are considered correct or permissible. 

Claudia: It's also a bit paradoxical as a principle, multiplicity, because we want to be able to agree on some things at least. So we want to allow for a diversity of opinions, a diversity of interests. But we still want to be able to converge on certain principles and ideas. So one of our fellows here at Building 21, Émile, pointed out that this is why rituals make us humans feel good and why they're so important. And we certainly lost some of those ritualistic practices nowadays. So one problem which emerged from our discussions with respect to that is that we live collectively but everyone is looking for their own meaning without any sort of guidance. 

Viola: Yeah, I think as a kind of – not rebellion, but pushback to a lot of very organized ritual activity that happened until very recently, at least in the Western world. So a lot of religion. You're not expected as much to share these rituals anymore. It's everyone's personal journey through life, which has some very good aspects. You can kind of figure out where you're going by yourself. At the same time, we lose a lot of contact with other people. There's less of a sense of community in that sense. And so we need to have kind of a balance, I think, between having something that's fully a group activity and something that's completely personal and isn't related to anyone else. Which, you know, balance in general is a very important idea. 

Claudia: Yeah, and it was actually one of the suggested foundations as well, by Olivier, too. So we didn't get the chance to discuss balance so much. It seemed to be kind of unanimously accepted and it also came back when we discussed other topics during these talks. So really, balance is a foundation that is more basic, so to say, than many of the other concepts we discussed. For example, we discussed uncertainty during our most recent talk and whether that could be a foundation. And it was brought up that we can't be uncertain all the time, just like we can't be on psychedelics all the time, in order to be functional, right? And uncertainty is, again, a somewhat paradoxical principle because we want to value leaving room for reinterpretation, doubting oneself in order to reach a more objective and collective kind of truth. But at the same time, we are discussing principles that we would ideally like to be certain about. 

Viola: I think it's a good thing, or at least a good sign, that some of the foundations are paradoxical in large part because humans themselves are paradoxical. And, you know, if we have foundations that are incredibly rigid and only one way of interpreting them, and like, that's it, they're set in stone, then that in itself gets rid of any kind of balance or flexibility or uncertainty. So I think that having foundations that reflect what humans are like in general is probably a good sign that they're going to be at least applicable and that they actually might work. 

Claudia: Yeah, and you mentioned flexibility, which is another foundation that we discussed, so what does it mean to be flexible? When we use the term flexibility, we would like to point to valuing our capacity to change and adapt over our ability to strictly pursue one aim. And it also means that we are willing to detach from and question our usual thought patterns. 

Viola: And this is very important, I think, because if you're always stuck in the same kind of ideas, if you're always stuck in the same route, the same routine and everything, it's very hard to be creative, I think, it's very hard to imagine other ways that life could be. And all of those are really essential to – at the risk of sounding a bit cheesy, building a better tomorrow. 

Claudia: And once again, there seems to be a recurring theme in the foundations that we've mentioned so far, namely flexibility is a bit similar to uncertainty. In some ways, it's also compatible with multiplicity, so by being flexible, we're able to adjust to a complex reality with multiple voices and multiple truths. So, Viola, would you like to give us your thoughts on this recurring theme? What term do you think is best? Do you think that flexibility and uncertainty are almost synonymous in a sense that we should only keep one of the two? 

Viola: I don't think they’re synonymous. I don't think that uncertainty in and of itself can be a foundation, because it's not really something that you do. It's more a state of being, kind of. But I think flexibility gets at the problem pretty well, in the sense that if you're flexible, you're okay with things changing. You're okay with changes of plans, with – I'm saying the word change a lot, but basically flexibility means that you're okay with change. And uncertainty is not knowing what's going to happen, which means that something could very well change. And so, if you're flexible, I think by definition it means that you're okay with things being uncertain, which is really important. 

Claudia: Yeah, and we did get some suggestions for how we could reinterpret or rename this foundation of flexibility. So, someone suggested openness, which could be synonymous, but it does seem to capture a bit less, because you can be open, that doesn't mean that you will adjust flexibly to a certain situation. 

Viola: Exactly, because openness means that you're – at least the way I see it, you're open to hearing about new ideas, you're open to trying new things, but that doesn't mean that you're going to be convinced by any of them. Plus, flexibility kind of implies both that you're ready to receive any exterior motivations or exterior ideas, and that you can act on them. 

Claudia: And one last foundation that was added to this first list was Regeneration, which I suggested last minute, and which hints at something different, namely valuing the innate ability of life to regenerate itself, and pursuing that over, for example, destruction. This is also a foundation that presupposes some form of optimism, and that at the same time acknowledges something objective. We have the well-known Chernobyl example where nature has taken over the debris, and we've also all experienced how our wounds heal and how our hair grows back after we cut it. 

Viola: I think regeneration is very interesting and a pretty important idea. The term itself was – not everyone thought that that was the best term. We also had a few alternate suggestions for the same idea. So Paul J., a neuroscience professor, suggested creativity or energy as a broader, less restricted term. 

Claudia: I like energy, and it is true that creativity, like regeneration, also allows for growth for something new to come about. However, there seems to also be differences between creativity and regeneration. Creativity is not the same as life after death or new life. What I like about regeneration is that it attributes value directly to life itself, whereas creativity is something that is strongly connotated as only belonging to humans, and perhaps computers, as we've discussed in one of our previous podcasts. 

Viola: I would say that creativity isn't restricted only to the human sphere or human technology. I think that there are a lot of instances of various animals using pretty creative solutions to problems. But it's true that, at least the way that we generally think of creativity, it seems more human than applicable to the rest of the natural world. 

Claudia: This means we could also look at mutations as a creative process of nature, where nature randomly and creatively, one might say, outputs these genetic mutations which represent solutions, sometimes, to a natural problem. 

Viola: Yeah! But in any case it’s true that energy is more, at least obviously, applicable to basically any living organism, and energy is something that's really necessary for everyone, everything on the planet to survive. It really is a very universal trait, quite literally. 

Claudia: Energy, I thought, was maybe a bit too broad to constitute a foundation because you need energy to do bad deeds, and you also need energy to do good deeds, therefore it doesn't seem to provide some kind of guidance for a better society. So we've established creativity is different from regeneration, and we might still want to keep regeneration as some sort of hopeful foundation and also a scientific foundation. What I mean by that is we choose to put more value on the regenerative ability of nature rather than on money. I don't know. But creativity could still be considered as a possible foundation. Do we want to make creativity another foundation, or what would that mean for it to be a foundation? 

Viola: I think it should definitely be a foundation. Creativity is essentially finding interesting and new solutions to problems. I think it's roughly what it means. And that can take any kind of problem, so a math problem, a scientific problem. And I think that without a society that believes in the importance of new and different and creative solutions, we're not going to advance, and we're not going to get to any of the really, really cool places that humans have managed to get to over the millennia. 

Claudia: That's a very compelling point, but I'm just going to play the devil's advocate for a second and say that people with bad intentions can also use creativity in order to reach their goals. 

Viola: I think that any of these foundations can, if you try hard enough, be used for bad rather than good. I think anything in the world can be used for bad or good. But that doesn't mean that they're not worth pursuing. That doesn't mean that they're not worth having. Like any tool, a hammer can be used to kill someone. It can also be used to build a house. It's not because it can be used for something bad that we should reject it. To use an expression I like very much, let's not throw the baby out with the bath water. 

Claudia: Why do you like this expression? I always thought it's fascinating how it stayed, even though we don't wash in the same ways anymore. But good. So this leads us towards the conclusion of the first part of our podcast. 

Viola: So really, the main takeaway from the first talk was that there were four foundations that more or less everyone agreed on, not unanimously, as is typical for B21. And so just to recap, those are flexibility, multiplicity, communication, and regeneration. 

Claudia: Oh, and we also touched on balance. 

Viola: Yes, balance, which is a very important one as well. 

Claudia: And creativity might be joining the crew, so this leads to six foundations. Of course, none of those are set in stone. And during the part two of our podcast, we're going to talk about spirituality as a foundation, and we'll have a more thorough conclusion at the end of part two.