Local is regional and regional is national. And, well, national is transnational is global. It all starts in participating with whatever resources we have and whoever is willing to work with us on our local levels.

Mending The Torn Social Fabric of America

Well, first off, it feels like they’re seeking genuine synthesis between the variety of perspectives that show up in the political spectrum in America.

I like how the Institute of Culture Evolution (ICE) talks about finding higher ground rather than middle ground. So often when we hear discussions about finding reconciliation between the traditional and progressive camps it feels like the talk is pigeonholed into figuring out what one side needs to give up in order to satisfy the other side. And neither side wants to give first, so it’s this stalemate of anger and resentment for all the ways that each side has been wronged by the other side.

That being said, ICE approaches is not as middle ground but as higher ground. We’re not looking to just find a compromise in the middle, instead we’re seeking higher order solutions that take into account the truths of each side and aim to craft solutions that satisfy the needs of the core bedrock values of both sides of the picture.

Another thinker I enjoy listening to, Daniel Schmachtenberger, has espoused similar perspectives on how we may approach improving the co-ordination of society. In the Rebel Wisdom series The War on Sensemaking, Daniel speaks specifically about this point that we need a higher order synthesis between the right and the left, rather than a middle ground and this is only accomplished through enabling dialogue

Promoting Cultural Intelligence

Cultural intelligence feels like an apt term for the direction that we need to head as a nation in America. We’ve become foolish and self-deceived when it comes to politics and a push towards overall cultural intelligence would do us good. The solution is never in saying that one side of the political spectrum is right. Rather, the problem lies in the fact that we’ve lost (or maybe never had in the first place) a level of cultural intelligence and perspectival wisdom in how we show up in the political sphere.

Expanding What We Can Value

Another core principle of the organization that really stood out to me was their note on expanding the scope of what we can value. This feels essential because the stalemate between right and left in America seems to have at it’s root this inability to inhabit our value structures.

Again, and I’ll repeat this as many times as is needed, it’s never that one value system is better than another. It’s that every value system is pointing to valid aspects of reality and our political polarization is partially due to the fact that we are so limited in the scope of what we can value. We either side with the lefts values or the right, but what about valuing all of these aspects of the political spectrums.

As ICE has beautifully laid out, there are Four Americas. The just, smart, free and real Americas. Each camp has it’s own set of values, each with their positive and negative qualities.

Polarization is Not Belief Clashing but Reality Clashing

I’ve had this gut feeling for a while now and it’s been confirmed by ICE. That you will never change someone’s core values, let alone through surface level propositional debates. Our core values are the literal construction of the world we inhabit. Our very sense of self and world is rooted in the values we have, which likely also have strong familial attachment ties. It’s absolutely fruitless to try to uproot someone out of their core values and change their position to your core values.

On the other hand, there is an approach that could lead to meaningful cultural change and it involves expanding the scope of what we can value. If you can’t change someone’s values then you might as well seek to genuinely understand why those values are so central to their sense of reality.

Again, the only way forward is to find more complex, higher-order solutions that solve for the four different value structures all at once. That’s when real change happens. We should never ask people to change their values, but rather we should seek to more deeply internalize their values and to propose solutions to them that not only satisfy my value system but also there value system.

Towards a More Mature Society

Overall, what I take from ICE is that we must move towards a more mature version of our American society. We must realize that fighting for values that are limited in nature won’t work and that we must change our approach altogether.

In order to show up in service of this more beautiful future, we must also train ourselves to be fit for service in this world and part of this training involves that we increasing our capacities for holding not only cognitive but also emotional complexity. This is no easy task. It’s something that me and my team at Phoenix Culture are working to craft, starting with the Hero100 and then expanding into entire protocols for human transformation that afford greater degrees of openness, cognitive complexity, emotional intelligence and ultimately, as ICE has suggested, cultural intelligence.

We’re maturing as a civilization and our role involves not only realizing that we can change social-psychological landscapes of everyday life, but actually stepping up and doing so. In other words, the very social fabric of everyday life can and must be intelligently developed. One great place to start is with the fabric of American society and relating more wisely to the multitude of values and worldviews embedded in our culture.