Life Is, at Bottom, Diversity

Extracts

• “there are cultures and languages where the past is conceptualised as what can be seen, i.e. in the direction we are facing, and where the future is conceptualised as what can’t be seen, i.e. in the opposite direction that lies behind us”
• “Humans evolved to make sense of the world at human scale”
• “Autistic life is incompatible within a society that lives within an Overton window”
• “the 3-dimensional metaphor sphere of discourse, which can shrink or expand, has increasingly been replaced with the metaphor of a small 2-dimensional window for “allowable discourse”, which can only be shifted or nudged a little” discussion-and-debate
• “Neuronormative people primarily learn by imitation, adopting the metaphors of the dominant culture, and only much less frequently do they invent entirely new metaphors based on patterns of first hand non-linguistic sensory input. In contrast, Autistic people learn more from conscious processing of raw sensory information, creating a space for imagining new possibilities” imagined-futures learned-patterns
• “hypernormative cultures / cults are able to generate a level of paradigmatic inertia from which it is very hard to break free” hypernormative cultures
• “Human cognitive limits are adaptive if we live in a human scale society, and if the frames and metaphors of our mental models are in tune with the ecosystems that we are part of” balanced-ecosystems
• “Complex industrialised societies overload us with social information from more people than we are capable of understanding, and incrementally alienate us from the non-human environment that we depend on for our basic needs and wellbeing.” industrialisation balanced-ecosystems information-overload
• “Our immediate goal should be to prevent harm to people and the more-than- human world while fostering resilient, diverse, ecological, nonviolent, compassionate, and more self-reliant communities. Our ultimate goal must be a way of life that offers security, fairness, and wellbeing while using energy and resources at sustainable rates and restoring natural systems rather than further degrading them.” fairness interdependence sustainability
• “maximize certain short-term benefits and rewards along the way in order to maintain collective emotional health and social cohesion.” collectives interdependence pleasure
• “boundary layer of relationships that connect a cultural organism to the outside world, like the semi-permeable membrane of a biological cell. In this frame, just like a cell, a cultural organism has many critical interdependencies with the outside world;” interdependence relationships interfaces

---

the rest of this essay is a re-edit of Holotropism A Multi-Dimensional, Spacious, Edgeless Terrain

• “If a psychological theory is not true ecologically, it is not true. That is, if it does not apply equally well to plants and chipmunks and bacteria, it isn’t foundationally true.” (Stephen Buhner) Everyone and everything connects”
• “The gift that we all bring to the world is the (re)generative potential of all the trusted relationships that we co-create.”