The Examined Life
The Examined Life podcast explores the questions we should be asking ourselves with a range of leading thinkers. Each episode features a different interview, and appeals to those interested in wisdom, personal development, and what it might mean to live a good life. Topics vary from discussing the role of dopamine mining and status anxiety, to exploring the science of awe and attention.
The Examined Life
Phoebe Tickell - Is the root of our problems found in the way we see the world?
Phoebe Tickell is a biologist, systems thinker, and 'imagination activist'. Phoebe works across multiple contexts applying a complexity and systems thinking lens and engaging people in how to think differently about the planet and its problems. In 2020 Phoebe created 'Moral Imaginations', which researches and implements collective imagination exercises and training to inspire change and find new solutions in an era of unprecedented disruption and potential for transformation.
In this episode we explore the ways in which western culture has shaped the way we think and approach the problems of our day. Phoebe suggests that taking a step back and questioning received wisdom might provide more promising solutions to the crises we are currently facing.
I'd rather be maladjusted than have to live my life pretending that this is okay. It's not okay and I think we can do better. I think we can and I think a lot of people, when they're given the permission and the hope which a lot of the work I do at the moment the moral imagination work, some of it is helping give people that sense of agency, like we can change it. Even if you have to therefore sacrifice a lot and you don't get the big house and the car, whatever it's worth it. It's worth it to live a real life of meaning, of richness, of value, of connection and actually be part of the change.
Speaker 2:Hello and welcome to the Examined Life podcast. With me, kenneth Primrose, this series, I've been in conversation with some fascinating thinkers from an incredibly diverse set of backgrounds. Within the diversity, I would say the common theme is looking for those places that can help us to pay attention to a wisdom that is often lacking and perhaps subversive to the dominant voices in the room. I've spoken to Dacher Keltner on what awe has to teach us as an emotion, elizabeth Oldfield on character formation, Dougald Hine about how to live well at a time of collapse, ian McGilchrist on what we are failing to pay attention to, jill Bolte-Taylor on becoming more present, todd Kashtan on the importance of making space for the wisdom that exists on the margins and Alex Evans on what it is we should be doing with the religion-shaped hole in ourselves and society.
Speaker 2:Today, as the final interview of the season, I'm delighted to be speaking to Phoebe Tickell. Phoebe is a scientist, educator and social entrepreneur. She is the founder of an organisation called Moral Imaginations and I've been aware of her work for a number of years. It was when I was interviewing Ian McGill-Christonsky that he suggested reaching out to Phoebe as we had some common interests. I'm glad he did. I really enjoyed talking to Phoebe about her work as an imagination activist and, as you'll hear in this conversation, phoebe thinks that what's required of us right now isn't tweaking our processes or focusing on solving specific problems to do with food security or education or whatever, but a radical rethink of the logic and reasoning that we approach life with. There's been a slight delay in getting this episode published, but I hope and trust that it will be worth the wait, and I hope you enjoy listening to Phoebe as much as I enjoy talking to her. Phoebe Tickell, thank you so much for joining me today on the Examined Life podcast. It's a joy to be able to connect with you.
Speaker 1:Thank you for well. Thank you for having me and thank you to Ian McGilchrist for connecting us.
Speaker 2:That's right. So, yeah, when I went to see him he suggested, I suppose maybe the nature of the questions I was asking or what we were discussing connecting, and I'm glad he did. So, yeah, thank you very much, ian, for many things. Phoebe, you've got a very interesting and unique space that you occupy in the world of ideas and kind of being, I suppose, a thought leader, and I'd love to get into that and unpack it. But I wonder if we might get there via the question that you've been kind of animated by and driven by in your work and your thinking. So could we just jump in and begin with the question that you think we do well to be asking ourselves?
Speaker 1:So the question is is the root of our problems found in the way we see the world?
Speaker 2:Great question. I wonder if we can begin by unpacking a bit. What problems have you got in mind when you ask that?
Speaker 1:What comes to mind for me is the question how do we live well together? How do we live well together? That is the core of the question that I'm asking in my work and the work that my organization, moral Imaginations, does, rather than focus on specific problems like food waste or pollutants in the soil or ADHD in kids. You know I've spent I spent time in my twenties almost like apprenticing to different problems. I spent some time in the food system, working with farmers in the regenerative food, regenerative agriculture space, with soil scientists and understanding, you know I got really deep into understanding the crisis of soil, the crisis that that crisis has on our microbiomes, the crisis of the food that the problem with the soil creates, the constraints that farmers are facing. Why is it that farmers find it so difficult to transition to organic farming? And some of that is in the policy space, some of that is, you know, financing and practical constraints, all the way to the culture and the narratives around food. And we worked with you know I've worked with a bakery, gail's Bakery in connecting with regenerative farming. So I spent time in that the food space and we could, we could go deep into that and I I find that you know, there was a time when I thought this is the core. This is the core of the problem. You know, I was trying to find the core of the problem, um, and I thought I'd found it in food.
Speaker 1:I'd worked in education. You know, education is is just as um, it's just as worthy as a candidate for the core of the problem. You could easily root all of our problems in society to the crisis of education. We don't prepare our citizens, our people. We don't prepare people to enter society knowing who they are, having an understanding of history, of where we've come from, understanding politics, understanding the constraints that we're facing as a species, understanding potential existential threats, um, right now and in the future, like and and knowing themselves, knowing who they are, what they want out of their lives, what they do. We don't ask questions around what does it mean to live a good life at school? You know that's where I actually started my um career, in, outside of any single discipline.
Speaker 1:So systems, you know, in systems change, trying to change systems. I started in, uh, reimagining the education system. So there's education great, that's the core of all the problems. But but then there's also technology. There's technology policy and there's education Great, that's the core of all the problems. But then there's also technology, there's technology policy and there's, you know, and collaboration, which was the final place I spent some years in in working out, asking the question how could we make decisions in a better way? How can humans come together and create conditions for better decision-making and better choice-making and better governance and infrastructure in the organizational realm and institutional realm?
Speaker 1:And I saw these patterns that just recurred across all of these spaces and that's where I got really deeper into systems thinking. I mean, systems thinking and a perception of complexity has been the thing that has driven me since my scientific career. All of those projects and kind of interventions that I worked on were all manifestations of a way of seeing the world that is systemic, that is holistic, that understands the way nature organizes and therefore can apply the principles and the ways of uh organizing and being that are um present in nature to the way that we organize society. And there are fields of biomimicry, which you know, and socio biomimicry. But what I started to see is that there's something beyond that.
Speaker 1:It's not just about taking the patterns of nature and just applying them to solutions, because actually there's a paradigm that needs to shift in the way we see the world, the way we attend the world, and it's very, very abstract and difficult because putting language on basically gestalt, or you know the, the myriad of senses and, uh, heuristics and assumptions and mindsets and values and worldview, that whole glom of what makes up my interface with the ecology of relationships and things, and you know the world, that's where I think the root of the problem is, and I remember when I realized that I couldn't, in good faith, work on anything else than that, so I was like, well, I'll always be wanting to go back to the root.
Speaker 1:Um, I felt, I felt like a bit of a like, a little bit of like a frustration about this is going to be really hard and potentially like, yeah, it's hard to bring rigor to that, and that's what my work is about is how do we bring rigor and practice and and apply, how we can understand the problem space? That's almost like step one, but how do we actually bring interventions into the world that can help shift, um, humanity's perception? I don't know what you'd call the like there's. There needs to be a noun for, like, the collective perception. The new sphere, I think, has been coined, coined before. What did you call it the, the new sphere, but that doesn't the new sphere.
Speaker 2:What like? What's your, what's your spelling?
Speaker 1:there, uh, it is n-o-o-s-p-h-e-r-e. Um, what's what's new? Okay, here we go. So, new, new space. So it was a concept developed by a biogeochemist, the dance venansky, and a philosopher, and, ah, the jesuit priest, pierre talhart de chardin. Oh, yeah sorry, I'm not a french speaker, but, um, exactly, I mean, I, I know his work. Yeah, so it's defined as a postulated sphere or a stage of evolutionary development dominated by consciousness, the mind and interpersonal relationships. And that's not quite it. Um, it's more.
Speaker 1:Never heard this, this is interesting yeah, the way I think, because I've got a background in genetics, um and and that realm, you know you can think about the kind of sum total of dna on the planet, and so I'm thinking about the sum total of, like, perceptional dna, if that makes sense, so like the, the kind of coding of how we see the world, if that had a dna.
Speaker 2:That's what I'm working on and it's funny because I'm a genetic engineer gosh phoebe, there is so much in that it's funny because I'm a genetic engineer, gosh Phoebe, there is so much in that it's like trying to drink water from a fire hose, if I can maybe try and tell you a bit about what I heard there and then we can unpack that a bit. So you've got these issues that are sometimes technical, sometimes policy related, sometimes narrative driven, and there are parallels with how issues manifest, whether it is with food or education or healthcare or whatever. And upstream of those are I suppose for want of a better word worldview issues working in the realm of, yeah, attention Like how we're approaching these big facets of life is the problem, and we are busy downstream trying to kind of try to fix things that are never really going to be fixed until we approach it in a better way. Is that yeah?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that that get that gets closer to it. And I'd add to that, or just I'd layer on top of that, that this isn't about meditating more or taking more time to be and to just have more space. I mean that's very important in order to even be able to do the work that I'm talking about. I mean that's very important in order to even be able to do the work that I'm talking about. However, like a good I mean a good example is this is about the ontology and the epistemology and of the way we see ourselves, the world, how we make you know epistemologies, how we make new knowledge, how we come to understand the world around us, how we come to understand the world around us. And so if you had someone with ways of seeing the world and relating to it that essentially saw all nature as dead, I mean to choose a really simple and easy one which feels actually more and more alive at the moment. If somebody just sees nature as um dead and uh and inanimate and other to humans ourselves, which is insane, obviously, and that's why I always bring in the the fact that we're more. We're actually more, just numerically, we have more bacterial cells, um than human cells. So even just factually, scientifically, it's. But so if you've got someone who sees nature like that, they could go away and meditate on a mountain. They could even go and do an ayahuasca ceremony or maybe like 50 ayahuasca ceremonies. If they haven't done the work to shift that ontology, that way of actually making sense of and understanding the way they see the world, then it won't change just because they meditate. So it's almost like meditating and taking time away and kind of just having space and time to reflect can actually do quite a lot of self-organizing good.
Speaker 1:I think that as a base level is necessary. But it's also because we are programmed from such a young age by culture and by school and by what we're taught and how we're taught and the ways I mean culture, the ways that we learn, that we're allowed to show up, and the ways that you know your parents talk to you about nature or food or education or success or values. All of that has programmed. Not to use a technical, you know, I try and steer clear of the mechanical metaphors. That's why DNA is a bit more helpful, but just the same way we have DNA and then the conditions and the environment changes our epigenetics, you know, changes the expression of our DNA code and then the conditions and the environment changes our epigenetics, you know, changes the expression of our DNA code and actually the vast majority of who we are is not encoded in the DNA. It's all post-DNA processing, it's different parts of the DNA talking to each other and interacting with the environment and what you eat and your fear and hormones, and you know all of that stuff that happens after you're born, but it actually changes not just the way that you express your dna, but it even changes the dna and then you pass that on to your offspring. It's the same in, it's the same for perception, it's the same for shaping, um, who you become, but in the realm of the intangible, or you know, some people call this the inner and the outer and I think that's unhelpful, um, it's because we're, you know again that almost that create. It strengthens the same programming, that there's an inside and there's an outside and you're an individual self and you're separate from the world. I would call it like the intangible and the tangible. So this is the realm of thoughts, narratives, ideas, feelings, sensations, neural pathways. I mean there's a tangible aspect to it too, and this was really core, really key, in my undergrad degree.
Speaker 1:I remember I I was taking cell biology. We had to choose three subjects. I chose cell biology, plant science and microbiology and then wildcard. I took neuroscience and all my tutors were like what are you doing? Why would you do that? It doesn't make any sense. Nobody had done this combination of subjects.
Speaker 1:And to me it's interesting because, if I look back, it's almost the perfect degree as a degree for systems thinking, because I learned about the way nature organizes and plant development and morphogenesis and cell development and patterning, which was the kind of the what. But then I also learned the how. How do we see the world? How do humans actually develop the perception machinery to see the world? And so one of the things that really stuck with me from my undergrad degree was learning about the visual cortex, and so what we learned about was that our eyes are actually physiologically programmed to detect edges. Physiologically programmed to detect edges. So it's actually in our neurophysiology to try and detect things and separate things, like it helps us not be overwhelmed by just, you know, by seeing the vast complexity of the world. If we just took in all the complexity, we wouldn't be able to actually manipulate.
Speaker 1:And this is getting into Ian McGilchrist's territory. That's part of why we have got on so well, because his work has been. I mean, I finished studying 10 years ago, so he was already starting to write the Matter of Things then and he's given such a wealth of evidence and thinking and research and understanding around, yeah, yeah, this realm of the attention. But I thought that, and that was fascinating to me, that actually biologically we are, we are encoded to um, highlight and separate and create like shapes so that we can say, oh, that's the table, not just like the world, so that's already encoded and then through.
Speaker 1:What's also interesting is, every time you open your eyes and you see something, you can detect that there's informational, there's an informational pathway that goes up your, you know, up into the cortex. I might that there are kind of scientific names for these different nerves and bundles and neurons and ganglia and things but there's there's information going up this way through your eye, um, into your visual cortex. But there's also information that comes down your eye, like into your eye. That actually so there's information coming that changes the lens with which you actually see the world. So that is what I'm really interested in is how do we consciously work with that information pathway that comes down that is actually influencing how you see the world and then therefore influences how you feel.
Speaker 1:You know, if I think that there's a snake, I'm going to have a you snake, I'm going to have that information. The information is coming down saying potentially dangerous, I'm going to die. Adrenaline it sparks off adrenaline. Adrenaline gets you moving, you run away. There's no separation between the way we see the world and what we do. So working on this is working on systems change, because it's working on our actions, but at one level, before the actions.
Speaker 2:And is this something that you like? So you had your academic studies, which gave you a kind of insight and maybe a pause to reflect. Has it been by degrees that you have stood back and thought there's a fundamental issue of kind of perception and attention here, or did you have, like road to Damascus type experiences where you, you know a gestalt, if you want, where you realize or you know a combination of both, you're breathing the same air, a combination of both. How did you? You're bringing the same errors, the rest of us. So how, how do you stand back from it and see it differently?
Speaker 1:I can chart this back. I've always been interested in, I guess, the human, human perception. That's why I took that, um, that third of my degree in it's. Also through science you become really trained to spot the patterns. You become there's a training that goes on which is about experimentation, testing, learning, spotting patterns and, and try, you know, detecting those patterns across different contexts.
Speaker 1:Um, I mean, I'll throw out a couple of thoughts. My my very quick and dirty answer is both, you know, I've had kind of quite profound experiences and moments of transformation myself. I think, especially in my early years, like from at university age and directly after. It was a series of frustrations with trying to make change and seeing that it wasn't possible based on ways of seeing the world. So I could just talk about some of those. Like the first one, I mean the very first, I think, trigger into not just going ahead with with the path that was laid out before me, which was working in biotech and helping develop new biofuels and providing an alternative to, you know, our petrol addiction, which felt like a really, you know, a really great way to contribute to society. Um, but it was actually through going through university education and the disappointment of that experience. So going to Cambridge University, which felt like a massive honor and privilege and, you know, kind of made me quite felt, feel quite um, yeah, I felt like some awe before starting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I remember really feeling like, wow, okay, it felt a bit like going into a ceremony of some kind, like, okay, I'm doing this, this is a, this is a big thing. And then it felt like something was it's funny that I say ceremony, because it felt like a kind of desacralizing experience. It was like this is like a mockery of what I was expecting and the methods, the, the whole experience of starting fresh as week and going into you know what felt like a profound privilege and like knowing, having read about scientists and great thinkers and great writers who had gone to Cambridge and knowing that I was like walking in those footsteps and then getting to Freshers' Week and there's like absolutely no orientation. There's no like. You're here, you know, welcome, who are you? What are you here for? There was just none of that experience. There was just like, okay, bureaucratic, welcome, drinks, fresh as week, loads of drinking alcohol, you know, just like really trashy in a sense. Um, which, don't get me wrong, you know, as an 18 year old, I loved a party, but I was.
Speaker 1:I was shocked. I was shocked that there was so little intention. And then the other thing that really shocked me was just the being battered by information and that all the learning was around just learning facts and just this huge volume of information and not having enough time. And it was just one thing after the other. You'd have four lectures in a day in a lab and the next day you'd have two more lectures in another lab and it was like how we meant to grow as individuals.
Speaker 1:I felt like my personal development as a human being stopped when I entered Cambridge and it restarted when I left, and that was shocking for me that there was no space for that and the amount of mental health issues and depression and the pressure that people basically kids at age 18 are under to perform in exams nothing to do with learning, with a capital L, becoming becoming a human, becoming an adult, having the responsibility like having the privilege of a Cambridge education and there not being any conversation about what is your responsibility going into the world, who do you choose to be, how are you going to contribute to society? And the fact that they let big business, banks and consultants come in and just, you know, like we're like some kind of meat market, they just let that happen, that the people that were allowed in to talk to us to convince us into you, wrong, so wrong, that people with the privilege of that experience in education and those resources, and you know whether it's the. There's a whole conversation around making education accessible beyond the elites and you know, in Cambridge it's something like 7% is a state school educated. So there's a lot of problems in terms of accessibility and equity. But the fact that after that experience, we're just that, the people coming out of that, those degrees, some of the the world, the, the UK's smartest, you know, brightest kids are just fed into Goldman Sachs and P&G and you know McKinsey, I think is.
Speaker 1:So I've got really deep into this story and I know there's a kind of bigger question. But just to kind of round that off, I think that experience left me confused. I felt confused about society and I realised that my imagination, my moral imagination of what a university education was going to be and should be, was so far from what it was. And that made me start reading Ivan Ilyich, deschooling Society, krishnamurti, paulo Ferreira's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. You know that was my reading list after leaving my degree, and I started to realize, hang on, there are ways of organizing society that are very different and better than what we're currently doing, and so I'm dedicated to that gap. Why are we not doing it like that?
Speaker 2:Yvonne Illich and Krishna Murthy. Actually one of the um, one of the themes, I think, from this series, uh is, you know Krishna Murthy's quote it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a sick society. So my, the sub stack that goes with this podcast, is called positively maladjusted. Like how do we, uh, how can we be positively maladjusted to a sick society? And in a sense I'd love to, I'd love to get into this moral imagination thing. But what you know, the milk ranch where you have goldman sacks, or whoever coming into universities and recruiting, it seems very much symptomatic of a consumerist society.
Speaker 2:The, the way capitalism has shaped us and formed us, that we're atomized, live in a kind of disenchanted, mechanical-seeming world in many ways, and this is presumably at odds with what you see in biology in terms of symbiosis and interconnection and the way that nature is. I was thinking recently about the fact that and maybe I've got just far too simple a view of it but things in nature tend not to exist for themselves. They you know, they they are, they're just interconnected in a way that's symbiotic, whereas the way our culture seems to have shaped us is we kind of exist, we're the heroes of our own story. We exist for ourselves in a hyper individualistic world and it's made us lonely, sad, and you know people who despoil the environment because of it. So is there was there an analog there between how you, what you saw under the microscope, or you know the at the larger level looking at the natural world, and how us, as human beings, are thinking about ourselves, particularly in the west?
Speaker 1:yes, yes, absolutely, and there was a. There was an analog I mean, there were many, that's what where I was kind of getting towards in terms of how did I get here? It's almost like I had the. I had the kind of the whole of it in a sense of okay, I need to work on this, but it's been filling in all these gaps, making sense of how all these pieces fit together for me. You know, in my quest and journey of being on this earth. You know, what am I here to do?
Speaker 1:Um, so there was an analog between my personal experience and the pain in that story about being at university and then looking at the education system and seeing the, seeing that actually everybody, like a lot of people, felt this way. Like when I talked to people I mean when I talked to people about when I was at Cambridge I would talk to other students and be like this is crazy. Don't you agree that this is insane? Like it could be so much better. It could be like this. Like why are we learning like this? And people would be like, oh, like I don't want to talk about this because I can't, I won't, like someone actually once said to me like if I open up that box, I won't be able to, just to just get on with it. I can't talk about that. So that was interesting to me, like there's a willingness that I saw in myself to to name the things that aren't working and to say this is wrong and even if it's uncomfortable, even if I'm going to be rejected, or wrong, and even if it's uncomfortable, even if I'm going to be rejected, or, you know, even if I'm a problem, I felt positively maladjusted. I was like you know what? I'd rather be maladjusted than have to live my life pretending that this is okay. It's not okay and I think we can do better. I think we can and I think a lot of people, when they're given the permission and the hope which a lot of the work I do at the moment the moral imagination work. Some of it is helping give people that sense of agency. Therefore, sacrifice a lot and you don't get the big house and the car, whatever, it's worth it. It's worth it to live a real life of meaning, of richness, of value, of connection and actually be part of the change. And what if we think, in a hundred years time, those of us who are standing up for life, what if, in a hundred years time, we look back and think, wow, those were the people, as well as all the people before us, who made this change happen. So it's helping that pro noia or that kind of hyperstition of what, what we might be able to do. Um, but back to the mic, just quickly back to the microscope.
Speaker 1:Um, there was another kind of comparison there at Cambridge, because part of what really disturbed me was how we studied life. You know, I was going into biology because I'd had an experience at age 17, again, quite a mystical experience and quite bizarre, but I'd managed to find my way onto this charity expedition in the Amazon rainforest in Peru and raised all this money to go out. And I'd had quite a mystical experience in the Amazon, in the jungle, and I felt this love affair with life, I felt this sense of like. I want to know life, I want to understand her, I want to understand nature, I want to be in this relationship.
Speaker 1:And then getting to Cambridge and thinking that this is one of the best places to cultivate that connection to life and instead we are not only like pummeled with information and the way we're learning isn't conducive to that relationality at all, because there's no space for poetry or reflection, or just even just being in nature, or just even just being in nature, just having time and space to just allow yourself to be holistically learning from nature and from life and from the earth.
Speaker 1:But then also that we were killing things to take them into the lab, we were studying death, and that was a real shifting point for me was realizing that actually my degree had got me so disconnected from life and I knew how to, you know, create microscopic slides with sections of like rat brains that had been preserved in formaldehyde, like I knew how to work with studying death or the death of life, but it had got me really far from life. So that there was something really cool there where I thought we need a science of life, we need a discipline that teaches people that, but not just teaching in the rational sense, but that hones a sensitivity to understanding how life works, and then for us to create our societies and institutions and our education systems from that place of deeply understanding life.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it's experiential learning, not just this kind of left hemisphere decontextualized.
Speaker 2:And, as you say, it's a fascinating point that you kill things to take them into the lab and then they cease to be what they are because they're no longer in that context, they're not in that relationship anymore.
Speaker 2:So I'd love to ask you a bit about moral imaginations and how engaging with the moral imagination is a way of thinking about how life could be different and indeed should be different. When you see certain books that do like very well, they do very well because they resonate with us. Like very well, they do very well because they resonate with us, like we, we have a sense that it's a you know, it was almost like the matrix as a film succeeded because people are like is that? You know there is more to the way we're living than we're currently aware of? Uh, and anything that kind of pulls back the veil a little bit, um, or joan harry's lost connections, I thought, was, you know, very astute, pointing out that we we're wired for certain connections that we've lost now, uh, so curious way to my question how does imagination, and maybe particularly moral imagination, um, re-engage us with what life could be?
Speaker 1:so it's funny, you bring up the, the matrix, um, which was inspired, you know, by some of the cyberneticists of its time. So it's, you know, it's incredibly relevant, um, and also, I agree, really interesting how much of a blockbuster that became, because it taps into something that everybody is aware of, um, that makes it into a fun kind of story. So a metaphor I use for why imagination to me feels like such an important part of the puzzle. It's not enough alone, but it's a really important part of the puzzle, and that is because I think of it like a muscle, um. And so if we think of like people who are physically weak, um, if powerful people, you know, just to think of like roman empire or something like a, if colonizers, powerful oppressors, come in, they can easily drag people away. You know people can't fight back. I think there's a parallel to what is happening in the consciousness. Let's say attention, because the same thing is happening. It's the same thing, as you know, as the McKinsey's arriving at the milk. What did you call it? The milk.
Speaker 2:The milk round. I remember being called that yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:I also yeah, it's a long time since I heard that phrase. Yeah, so them arriving at the milk round. If I feel like I had the muscle, the imaginative muscle, to think, I can see a different future for myself. That was my moral imagination and I went down the process. I got pretty far in the P&G interview process because it's so seductive, seductive, oh. You're going to be so well looked after. You're going to have this amazing job. You're going to be respected, it's going to be fun, it's going to be creative. We'll even get you a flat. You'll travel. You're just like you know you're. You're seduced. There's a seduction status and value in the eyes yeah, you'll have safety.
Speaker 1:I looked at you know the salary. I was like, oh my god, this is, you know, here is they're, here is a life, here's a life package for you. And you're like, okay, that's, that's, that's pretty amazing. And everybody else around you is taking these, you know offers and in fact maybe there's even competition. If you don't put in your application fast enough, you're going to lose out. So there's a whole seduction. Enough, you're going to lose out. So there's a whole seduction.
Speaker 1:And I think it's the, it was the power of moral imagination that made me think. I don't know what it is that I'm going to do, but I I can imagine that it'll be better than that. Not better like more successful, more status, more money. But it was just this, this, this trust and the and the vision you know there's. To me, that is the moral imagination. It's knowing your values and being able to imagine a world where we're working in jobs where we are passionate and alive and supported and that we have everything we need. And there's something about also the trust in um. I don't want to. It's hard to get into this territory without getting into like hippieville, but you know Goethe talks about that. You know, there's that quote of leaping and trusting that the universe will catch you.
Speaker 1:That's what I think strengthens through the muscle of moral imagination is that you, you realize that you're part of an intelligent universe, an intelligent cosmos, and so you know, you, we're not in a dead universe where there's so much here that we, you know, we could unpack this over like hours. But if we take the kind of modernity, industrial revolution, um, you know, capitalist paradigm, we would experience that as the the world is dead. You know, there are, there are like things in the world and it's our that, it's us as humans, we're the only living, conscious, intelligent things in this universe. In fact, even animals and plants are just dumb and you know, just like, like Francis Bacon and Descartes would talk about this kind of that machine. Cats are just machines. You know, they literally that this was spelled out. So if we take that as true, ok, the world is everything's just a machine, you lose.
Speaker 1:Firstly, you lose a sense that anything else is possible, because how is that going to change Unless? You know it's just impossible if you think about, like, if you don't believe, if you don't understand complexity and emergence and and the fact that this is an intelligent system, it would be impossible to change. You know london, for example, like it's never going to change. This is it? So?
Speaker 1:One thing is that you lose a connection to the possible and that things can change in these mystical and emergent, uh, non-linear ways. That's the first thing. The second thing is that if it's a dead world, then what I've got to do as an individual, separate self is I have got to fight as hard as I can to make sure that I'm safe, because nobody else is looking out for me, nobody's going to take care of me. There is no intelligent universe that is kind of helping you survive or taking care of you. You're in a dead world, dead universe, and so if I believed in that, I would have taken the PNG, the McKinsey route, because I need to start saving money as soon as possible. I'm not going to be taken care of and actually nothing else is possible.
Speaker 1:But I think it was that muscle of moral imagination that allowed me to think, if I stick to my values, if I trust myself, if I can trust that I can't see it right now, but something is waiting for me, that I, you know there's a gift waiting for me at the end of the tunnel if I say no to the things that don't align with my values.
Speaker 1:And that kind of trust is partly being able to believe that there are possibilities beyond what you know. So the unknown unknown there's a bit of that visioning and foresight and the ability to understand and appreciate that, even if you can't see the way out right now's, you know there's the unknown unknowns but the other thing is actually trusting that. And, yeah, this is the part that's quite. There's a mystical story that all of us are playing out and that in some shape or form we are not separate selves in a dead and material universe. We are in, we're intelligence, in a wider intelligence and there's some sort of wider intelligence and then you can sort of wider intelligence and then you can you know, you can go off in all sorts of directions. But that kind of trust means that I trusted that I would be hopefully, fingers crossed taken care of if I stick to what I know to be true and good and beautiful. So that that felt important to spell out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, I'm 100% on board, like all of what you're saying resonates. A question occurs to me, though. So last century, towards the end of the century before that, like this, was noted the way that we were being shaped by capitalism and communism emerged, and that it seemed an act of massive collective imagination.
Speaker 1:And it.
Speaker 2:you know, more people died, locked into that way of thinking, than any time previous. What would be? What be the, the kind of guiding principles that that stop replacing one toxic way of doing things with an imagination that you know? If you, if you read karl march like he, he spoke the truth about the oppression of the masses. I think his analysis is excellent, but where it led was terrible. Does it occur to you that imagination comes with dangers?
Speaker 1:I think imagination comes with dangers if you don't do the deeper ontological, epistemological work to actually change the foundations of the rules. You know what we started by talking about. You know, if you take someone who doesn't let's go back to, let's call him Sam, who thinks nature is dead, and Sam gets some time off work and imagines an amazing project that, just like, cuts down, you know, deforests a ton of pristine forest and creates a retreat center, you know, and makes loads of money Like that's imagination. I mean capitalism thrives on imagination. You money, like that's that's imagination. I mean capitalism thrives on imagination. You know that's. That's basically innovation.
Speaker 1:Is what I talk about the difference between moral imagination and just imagination in the current system? That just that's innovation. Um, and so if we just imagine, reimagine, without changing the deeper heuristics and paradigm, without changing, um, our sensitivity to, to competition and the way that that's programmed in as well at an early age, that it's, it's win-lose dynamics. You lose. If I win, then you lose. If you win, I lose those sorts of dynamics which are at a deeper level than just imagining a different system. Um, or change, you know, shifting the way the I mean the relationship to nature is a great one. You can have a communist society that still destroys all of the ecology. Which is what happened.
Speaker 2:You know, nothing shifted in terms of, you know, an ecological paradigm shift or the kind of inner work right, it's still treating things as mechanical and external, rather than that's what I'm talking.
Speaker 1:Exactly that's set. We've got a list of 10 mindset shifts. And it's 10 because you have to sometimes create lists and frameworks in order for people to even kind of just have something to like, you know, to like anchor onto. But we've got these 10 shifts and within that you've got like moving from a positivist, rational, materialist world view to one where you know the world is alive, animist, um, emergent, non-linear, um, so that that. And then there's the moving from a kind of from separation from nature to seeing nature as seeing ourselves as part of nature, seeing humans as interwoven into the web of life.
Speaker 1:You know, it doesn't matter if you are a generous, kind and, yeah, a good person or not. You can treat people like absolute shit and become very, very rich in capitalism. It's amoral. People with lots of money are not people who are better people. So there's an amorality there, in fact even an immorality, because you're more likely to amass a lot of money in this system if you're greedy, if you don't share, if you break your promises, if you exploit and extract. So moving from that to actually a system of putting the kind of qualities of who you are to, to have to live in a moral universe to believe that actually, if we all do well to each other, then we'll all be okay, we'll all be taken care of it's um, it's fascinating.
Speaker 2:I remember speaking to a philosopher in chicago, where they produce a lot of uh, nobel laureate, like um, economists, and question was like why is it that these, these economists, who are, you know, good moral, like they might be great husbands, wives, fathers, whatever, um, but they, they, they go to work and they're utterly ruthless. What happens there? And she said that they step over that threshold and they code the space differently. So where I'm no longer in an ethical realm, I'm in a exactly, you know, cheat as cheat can, and I, you know I'm gonna win, you're gonna lose and it's, it's an interesting kind of probably very destructive dissonance between our values and what we see as the imperative within. You know the wheel that we're running along.
Speaker 1:Absolutely Just on that for people who are interested. Rebecca Henderson has got a great book called Reimagining Capitalism. Which thinking because actually I think we need something far as we just talked about reimagining capitalism isn't enough. We've got to reimagine who we are, how we attend the world, the deep, deep foundations of life. But in her first chapters there's a really great kind of diagnosis of how it's got to the point where there is the more you just absolutely doggedly put capital first, the better it will be for everyone. You know, trickle down economics there was literally like false science, like it. It makes no sense. But if you believe that to be true, then you'll be acting immorally and believing that you're acting morally, like morally immorally. It's like I've got to act immorally so that in some other level of the system everyone's taken care of. But it's bullshit.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it seems perverse, like a complete kind of inversion of our values. I'm aware that we are running out of time and there's a question that I'd love to end with. You've done quite a lot of work within education and I wonder whether you might be able to suggest a practice, something that could be embedded in education, perhaps across the globe, something that could be embedded in education, perhaps across the globe, that you think might move the needle, that you think might have some impact on, uh, our moral imagination. Does anything kind of you know, bubble up for you there?
Speaker 1:I think that, should that could be like a whole hour conversation, which I'd love to have with you at some point, because I think we we would have a lot to talk about.
Speaker 1:But for me, what comes to mind is some sort of exercise where kids, where young people, could reflect on I don't know how to.
Speaker 1:It's an exercise we've done in our programs, in Moral Imaginations, where people basically start to collect, both from their history, like from their past, but also in the present day, like with a journal, moments of magic, moments where you glimpsed something that doesn't fully make sense, that brought you alive moments of enchantment and that it's such a simple thing but it brings alive the sense that we live in a magical universe.
Speaker 1:We live in a world of all the messages and signals that are coming um, you know that are that are here for us to pick up on to, to uncover what it is we're here to do. And if I could, if I could change anything, you know, it would be that I was encouraged more to listen to the whispering of life's calling to me sooner. And I know a lot of people reflect to me like, my god, you've, you know, you've woken up to what your purpose is so young, but like god, I I wish that that had been cultivated sooner because, because it can be right and I'd like I I resonate with people who tell you that, because you, you seem to have um earlier than than the vast majority of people.
Speaker 2:A previous conversation with Dacher Keltner, who studies awe, it's striking. I mean, he's Amazing work, amazing work really. And it feels like he'd say awe is always within arm's reach and you can always experience it, whether it's thinking of all the people who loved you into being.
Speaker 2:I feel like that exercise alone helps you pay attention to something of the magic all the people who loved you into being. I feel like that exercise alone helps you pay attention to something, at the magic and the mystery, and then it changes your orientation towards people. I've done it in when I sometimes teach. I um, I do these kind of exercises where let's let's think of those people who loved you into being and it changes the vibe, like in a very profound way and you suddenly got a receptive audience. So, yeah, I love that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I just I'm having a memory come up of why I think that is is I suffered from so much indecision when I was younger. I suffered from so much indecision when I was younger. I couldn't decide whether to study science or art. Should I go to Cambridge? Should I do the P&G thing? Should I not? I had so many moments and I think that was my intuition, glitching in with the programming, and so there were all these moments where I was like I'm confused because capitalist modernity and programming says this is the right decision, but something else is telling me to do this other thing and it doesn't make sense. And because of that disparity, I think I looked outside. I tried to get a lot of advice. I didn't feel like I could trust my heuristics and I think that if, imagine if our young people were mentored and brought up to trust their inner knowing, even if it doesn't make sense, even if it means leaving the job on the table or doing something that makes no sense like that, I think that would be that would change everything.
Speaker 2:Right. How can people tune into becoming positively maladjusted rather than acquiescing to a sick society? Yeah, exactly, great, great place to end, phoebe, thank you. Thank you so much for your time and your insights and wisdom today. I really enjoyed hearing them.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much. It's been great getting to know you and I kind of wish we could do a part two where I get to interview you Well yeah, let's do part two.
Speaker 2:Uh, we will, we will, we will come back to this. Uh, so, thank you so much and where will like? Final question here where can people find out about moral imaginations?
Speaker 1:uh, we have a website um wwwmoralimaginationscom and we've got a blog on substack. Um, yeah, those are the two good places, and my website is wwwphoebetickhellcom cool thank you so much, phoebe.
Speaker 2:Thank you for listening to this episode of the Examined Life podcast today with Phoebe Takel. This was the final interview of the season, though I will be following up with an episode of highlights and reflections. Watch this space for that to appear in due course. While I begin working on and thinking about the next series, I'll be writing my weekly, positively Maladjusted sub stack. It's here that I write about these interviews and try to apply some of their insights to my own life in a practical way. I enjoy writing them and I've been informed that at least some people enjoy receiving them. I found it a real privilege to have the conversations for this series and found it really life-giving. If you have appreciated listening, then do please share it with others and leave a review so other people can find it more easily. I would also be delighted to connect directly with you. I can be contacted at kp, at examine-lifecom. Until next time, thank you for listening and I wish you all the best in looking for the signal in the noise.