PERSPECTIVA

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"Nothing in my life is as meaningful as meditating." As listeners @RestIsPolitics will know, @RoryStewartUK is currently on a silent retreat for eleven days. At last year's @Realisation2024 I asked why he goes on them and what he finds there. CC @Perspecteeva @campbellclaret

I talked with @Jonathan_Rowson of @Perspectiva about a new social practice they’re creating, the antidebate. jimruttshow.com/jonathan-rowso… We discussed the nature of debate, the spectacle of endemic polarization, why debate may be irredeemable, multiple ways of knowing, the Oxford Union debates, the debate apocalypse of 2020, the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debate, the elitist aspect of debates, longtermism, the dialectic fallacy, presencing confusion, anti-debate as a practice, developing the form & facilitation skills, anti-debate trials to date, the current state of the art, setting a positive tone, choosing the question, the question bomb process, tableauing, why answering the question isn’t necessary, swarming, epistemic seduction, drawing on Quaker Speaking, recruiting the enigmatics, prefiguring the culture you want to live in, scalability, disaffection with the ambient internet, and much more.

"I'm not saying the antidebate's any kind of panacea... only that I think it's incumbent on those who care about democratic dispositions, including curiosity, empathy, intellectual engagement and so on, that you actually try to create things that are worth doing, that feel worthy of the challenges of our time and pre-figurative of a kind of culture you want to live in." - @Jonathan_Rowson on the antidebate as one answer to memetic addictions @Perspecteeva