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Transcript
Rob Johnson:
Welcome to Economics and Beyond. I’m Rob Johnson, president of The Institute for New Economic Thinking.
I’m here today with two friends, Gisele Huff, she’s the Founder and President of the Gerald Huff Fund for Humanity, and also John Powell, INET Board Member, but more importantly in this world, he’s the Director of the Othering & Belonging Institute at University of California, Berkeley. And he’s also a Professor of Law, African American Studies, and Ethnic Studies also at Berkeley. John had been a mentor to me for many years.
Gisele, we met two or three years ago, and you were an inspiration almost immediately. So, I’m very excited today because they convened a group which I had the good fortune to participate in on the questions related to automation and the various, I would say, visions of opportunity and belonging, and a way to get beyond some of the, what I’ll call, frightening and divisive turbulence that haunts us all at this time. They created what I would call a North Star, a vision, which we’ll explore in this conversation, which directs us all in the long-term to a place where we create and build and educate people into a better society than the one we see right before us now.
Thank you both for joining me. And let’s start with Gisele. First of all, how did you meet John, and how’d you guys decide to get together and do this report? What inspired you?
Gisele Huff:
It was my plan to do this convening that created the report, but I was well aware that Gisele Huff, Founder and President of the Gerald Huff Fund for Humanity, was not enough to get this going in any meaningful way in terms of bringing people on board that would have the heft to give this status. So, through Wendy Ake, who was both a participant and also is a collaborator of John’s, I started a campaign to get introduced to John, and eventually got to speak to him on the phone while I was at a conference on my cell phone while people were walking by. And I got him interested in this project. And eventually, he agreed, much to my delight, to become a co-sponsor so that now we had the gravitas that we needed in order to make this a success.
Rob Johnson:
And I would say from my own experience, John was kind of a North Star in guiding and direction of many things INET does. So, maybe we needed a North Star to help us create a North Star. John, what inspired you to join this project and, how do you say, roll up your sleeves and head out to space?
john a. powell:
Well, first of all, thanks Rob for hosting us. And so, as they say, I was waiting four years to be in that conversation with Gisele. So, when it finally happened I was delighted. And I think the visions that she brought to this was just so important not just for this project, but for the whole country, if not the whole world. And the ability to sort of step back and look at where we are going and where we want to be in a generation and to invest some time and energy and resources into that I think is extremely important. And it may be hard to sort of appreciate just how important given that we have so many immediate crisis that we have to deal with. But we always have crisis, some of the big, some small, but the future is coming, whether we’re ready or not. So, this seemed to me a project to help us be ready and participate in bringing that future forward.
Rob Johnson:
Gisele, recently, you made a podcast with a woman named Becky Pringle, who is a… She’s the president of the, national economics, excuse me, National Education Association. And I was really taken aback on… I think the name of the podcast was Common Ground. I was really taken aback by your interaction with her about when you met, you had very different perspectives on what the re-imagined education should look like, but by focusing on that North Star of that project, in the distance, you found a great ally in somebody that at the outset, I would say, someone less thoughtful might’ve found as an adversary? Did that inspire you in the construction of this, the experience that you had with that 27 person group along with Becky?
Gisele Huff:
Absolutely. When I founded the Gerald Huff Fund for humanity, which is named in memory of my late son who died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 54 in 2018… When I founded the fund and I looked around because his passion was universal basic income, and my mission is to forward that idea… But that idea is only part of a much greater idea that he captured in a techno thriller he wrote called Crisis 2038, which is a fiction portrayal of what will happen in 2038 if we don’t do something now, if we don’t start doing things now. And of course doing something now means having something to go for, a goal to reach. You can’t just do things without knowing where you’re going. So, when I got involved way before he died with the Education Reimagined experience which was arrived at a North Star for K-12 education.
And the result of that exercise was this lifelong friendship that I’ve established with Becky Pringle. And I looked for where I could make investments in the fund in activities, initiatives that would move this along, his passion, his ideas. I decided that I needed to do the same kind of thing for the future of the social contract, if you will, that I had done for K-12 education, that I had participated in K-12 education. As I walked together and I hired the Consensus Building Institute. The same facilitators, but did such a great job when Becky Pringle and I were involved.
Rob Johnson:
Was it Toby and David worked with that project as well?
Gisele Huff:
Yes. Toby and-
Rob Johnson:
The Consensus Building Institute?
Gisele Huff:
They were the facilitators. They were the writers of the Education Reimagined equivalent document, the North Star document for that organization. And the experience here wasn’t nearly as dramatic because we couldn’t be together. We had to be on Zoom, given that this happened in 2020. In our case, with the education, we actually met two and a half days, five times. And when you break bread, when you look into people’s eyes and you share a glass of wine and you hear their life stories, you’re in a different place than when you participate in something with Zoom.
Rob Johnson:
When I was a little boy, my father used to say to me… This was in Michigan, in the Detroit area. And he’d say to me, when you get into a dispute, always meet with someone. And I said, “Why dad? He said, “Because if you let them think you’re a dragon, then you’re a dragon. When you meet with them, you’re a human, and not a dragon anymore.” And, how’d they say, it obviously requires some skills in things like, what’s his name, Nathaniel Rosenberg’s book, Nonviolent Communication and so forth to make those personal interactions healing. But I think it did make things much more complicated to be only online for our group given the large size and number of people. Let me just put together a list of the people who are co participants. And then I’m going to ask you, how did you get this wonderful roster?
Because you shaped a very interesting group of people. As you mentioned, Wendy Ake from John’s Othering and Belonging Institute, Reverend Jennifer Bailey, who’s the Executive Director of the Faith Matters Network, Robert “Biko” Baker, the Executive Director of the League of Young Voters, Whitney Kimball Coe, director of National Programs at the Center for Rural Strategies, Sarita Gupta, director of Future of Work(ers) Program at the Ford Foundation, Derrick Hamilton, who’s now, I believe, at The New School and the head of Institute for the Study of Race, Stratification and Political Economy, Gisele, myself, John, Livia Lam, Vice President of Federal Relations Strategies 360, Richard Murphy, brilliant man, Editor in Chief and Director at ServiceNow, John and my friend, Manuel Pastor, Distinguished Professor of Sociology and American Studies Ethnicity, and he’s the director of USC Equity Research Institute.
And I don’t believe that’s about the stock market. I think that’s about the human condition. But I’ll just make that clarification. Anne Price, President of the Insight Center, William Rogers, Professor of Public Policy, chief economists of the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University. Scott Santens, a very bright man, senior advisor of Humanity Forward. And Andrea Severi from [Severi Consulting 00:11:28], who I know Gisele, you held in very high regard, related to the education dimension which is a part of this report. What was the process? How did you bring together this roster of people?
Gisele Huff:
Well this was done at some of the suggestions that John made and actually some the connections that the Consensus Building Institute had. And once you have someone like John on the roster, and you can bandy his name about, you do get more bites. People are interested in participating in something with a person of the stature that John has. So, we lost three people on the way, but we actually stuck it out with the 16 people, and they were all signatories. It’s one thing to come up with a work product, it’s another for people to actually put their names to it and be willing to be recognized as creators of it. And that was not a problem. So, the whole exercise was a real success, both in terms of the content and of the process, considering what we were facing, the goal and the virus.
Rob Johnson:
Well, John, I’ll use the analogy of a moonshot. Maybe you’re the Neil Armstrong that inspired all of these good people to come together, but what were you looking for in putting together this team?
john a. powell:
What Gisele mentioned earlier in terms of starting her foundation and her son looking at universal basic income and the future of work, which is a big issue. I live in the Bay Area in Berkeley. I work closely with a number of community groups, but also foundations and tech companies looking at automation and the future of work. And there’s been some experimentation out here with the universal basic income. And so, I think as people look up, they see, again, the future sort of rushing toward us. Automation is here. And I appreciate Gisele’s characterization, but I think she could reach anybody she want to just using her own name. I think people respect her for obvious good reason. But I also think the issue is really pressing.
And one of the difficulties is that it’s pressing in a pressing time. Gisele mentioned that we have not met in person. I hope that maybe one day we still would meet in person as a group, because I think it is a different energy, a different kind of exchange, Rob, that you mentioned from your dad. So, I think that the trick is how do you keep people’s attention when there’s so many things pulling on their attention? I think all of us get stretched way too thin, and yet these issues are so important. And also I appreciated what you’re talking about in terms of Gisele interacting with other people who may have differences. And there’s a book I recommend called High Conflict by Amanda Ripley. She talks about how to move from high conflict to essentially productive conflict. Conflict is going to happen, but how do you make it something that’s productive?
And in fact, if it’s productive, we learn from it, we sharpen our understanding, we see our blind spots. So, I think having a large group of people, not everyone agreeing on everything at the outset, but to work things through makes this a better product. So, really delighted to be a part of it. I hope it gets a lot of play going forward as people think about these issues.
Rob Johnson:
I find it fascinating because that roster I read off, you’ve got people coming from all different places. We’ll talk about the issues in the report, but they’re what you might call a subset. Everybody is focused on a subset, but how you all got everybody to focus and come together, not only on a deep dive about this issue or that, but the integration across multiple issues. And I think the, how do I say… I just marveled at the conversations. It almost looked like a whole bunch of butterflies and then it all converged. And it looked like the geese that are migrating in the fall. Everything was in formation at the end. And I didn’t feel any coercion or intimidation or anything in the process. How do I say, you each are quite artful, and I think you brought good people to the table. And then we started to, how do I say, paint a picture for that future. And-
john a. powell:
[crosstalk 00:16:28] As Gisele mentioned earlier, facilitation was important as well, having good facilitators who can help people hear each other. Toby and others, they did a really great job.
Rob Johnson:
That’s right-
Gisele Huff:
That is the key, people hearing people.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. They kept even the electronic boxing gloves from being put on. And I never saw a real breakdown. I saw further discussion. Like you say, the kind that Ripley would talk about as being constructive and illuminating, but it never got off the rails in my view. So, let’s talk a little bit about the key issues that you talked about. I enjoyed the fact that there was a background acknowledgement that there are what you might call processes in society, but we weren’t going to go into the means. We were looking at the ends. But you did state as a background that we won’t be there unless we have a healthy and responsive democracy and we have a healthy planet so that we can continue to live in a place as a society.
And so, those underpinnings then took us to a whole constellation of issues. How we can make technology enabling, how the communities are communities of belonging, how we embrace different identities, how liberatory education brings people authentically into those communities and respect for their identity. And I just felt like these interactions were extraordinary. And, the principles that you wove into a coherent design was great. Which ones resonated with you? What got your, how do I say, excitement? What made your heartbeat trigger off and go up?
john a. powell:
And I know, Rob, your listeners may not know, but Rob has been very active in both the movie and the music industry. And it’d be like saying, what do you like better, the drum or the guitar? It’s the drum and guitar together. That’s what I like. So, you may have great solo players, but when you put them together, then you’ve got something special. And I think the various issue… And, again, in some ways you could say, when we think about the future in the many different ways of thinking about in terms of climate change, in terms of demographics, the stuff that’s coming out of the census, you have to think about technology. And those things are interactive. And some of them sort of inspire fear. Any of them can inspire fear.
Certainly the changes that are happening in the climate, but also when people think about AI and technology and automation, we can almost keep that thought at bay, because it’s so scary. We don’t understand it. And so, things that we don’t understand, it’s easy to fear and just sort of put our heads down. So, I like the fact that we’re pulling all these things together. And so, when you think about technology, when you think about climate, when you think about people themselves, that we’re a diverse world… And it’s always been a diverse world. The United States has been at the forefront of that experimentation, and we’re being called to live together, not in our… It’s in our little box that we have the shared box. And the way you do that in part is through education. Education is a key.
Thomas Jefferson made the observations that people aren’t born citizens, they’re made citizens through education. We’re doing a pretty poor job right now. We’re not educating people to be citizens. And some people may be surprised I’m quoting Thomas Jefferson. I’m well aware he had 200 enslaved people even though he wrote the declaration of independence. He struggled. He was imperfect like all of us. But he also said part of being a citizen is learning to take the other person’s perspective. And in this society and this world right now, we’re just the opposite. We’re trashing the other person’s perspective. We don’t even want to hear. So, I think all of those together can create a really beautiful symphony, beautiful tapestry. But not one by themselves. They all have to be together. So, the thing that excited me is bringing all these different threads together.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. I’m going to play with your reference to my own musical background in its relation to technology, because technology is both tremendous potential, and you say, at times frightening. I’m very frightened of drone machines, because I think it stops that improvisational, sensitivity, and interaction, and it makes the, I’ll call, the music more saccharin than if you have human who might be not mathematically right on the beat. But if they’re a little behind or a little ahead that has feeling. And so there are times when I think technology is not what you might call Nirvana, but on the other hand, I think being too afraid of it, you’re, how do I say, missing a great deal of opportunity. But, Gisele, you had lots of experience exploring through these issues. And in many ways you were a pioneer in the education realm. What caught your fancy is as the report started to unfold or come together as a vision.
Gisele Huff:
So, what I really appreciated was the fact that at the core of this report is the individual. And it’s like peeling the onion. In order to make life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness a reality, you have to create an environment within which the individual can thrive. What this report does by picking out the environmental factors that are prevalent in the 21st century, like automation and like the lack of community that has been growing because of all of the political divisions that we’ve been living through… So, as you look at the outer circle of the graphic that they’ve created in this report, the healthy planet and the healthy democracy, which are like fundamental… But all of the elements that bear on the individual, both as the individual develops relationships with the community… And for me, belonging is the biggest thing. And I’m taking away your thunder, John, because that’s the name of your organization. But really belonging is at the bottom of many of the stripes that we’re going through now. People don’t feel that they belong, which is why as an aside, UBI is a unifying factor, because if everybody gets a thousand dollars a month, everybody is everybody. So, it’s very subtle.
So, that’s what we need to be looking for. And I think that’s what this document addresses. It shows how the four different influences on a human being in the context of the environment in which they live can be fashioned, can be set up, so that they enable that individual to be empowered and to feel like they belong, which are the two things that an agency, that they feel that they have control, the three things that make for happiness, as much happiness as we can find in this veil of tears. So, to me, this document captures that.
john a. powell:
And Rob, if I could just add a little bit to what Gisele just said, I think it’s really important. One of the [inaudible 00:25:15] questions we always get is, is it the chicken or the egg? So, that’s one of those questions, even as a kid we used to play with, right? Which comes first, the chicken or the egg? And so, sometimes we wonder, what comes first? Is it the individual or is it the community? Is it the individual or the group? And Gisele just answered the question. What comes first? It’s the environment. What comes first before the chicken or the egg is the farm. And normally, we don’t have to pay attention to the environment. It’s just there. It’s a container that we live in and take for granted. We normally don’t think about, can I breathe the air, right?
But when we can’t breathe air, we think about it a lot. And so, what we’re facing right now is we have cracks in the container, the very things that hold us, the very things that give us air and light and food and water. Literally, California, we’re talking about running out of water. A friend of mine just visited. His name is Paul’s Hudson. He lives in LA. He’s lived in his house for almost 30 years. There’s a creek that runs through his property. He says for the first time in the 30 years that he’s lived there, the creek is dry. So, we have to attend to the container if we are going to thrive as individuals in our community. And we haven’t really done that very well. Most of the time, we’re just taking it for granted. And what the report is calling our attention to is that even as we empower the individual, we have to make sure the container is there and we’re working for us.
Gisele Huff:
That’s so well put John. And it’s also very true that the earth is the fundamental container. But our institutions are the containers too, and we’ve totally ignored how they’ve gone a riot.
Rob Johnson:
Now, I just watched a wonderful forthcoming documentary on the question of water and how water being commodified is now destroying the farms and driving up the price of agriculture and how water should be, what you might call, part of the common good. It’s a forthcoming documentary that I was just asked to give them some feedback on. But it resonates exactly, John, with what you were saying about, how do I say, the devastation of the farm, the devastation… And they were talking about all kinds of creeks drying up. They’re talking about all kinds of places in the middle of California that can’t function any longer. And obviously that has all kinds of social ramifications as well.
John, Othering and Belonging Institute… I’ve always thought that there’s a synonym for othering. I call it fear. Othering really makes sense. And if we’re talking about humanity, othering within humanity has got very toxic effects. You and I each grew up in Detroit. We had a lot of experience with othering. In this vision of the North Star with the declaration, if you will, that othering has no role, how do we ward off the fear that allows it to grow?
john a. powell:
Yes. Well, it’s a question that’s actually faced people for much of our lives. I sort of remind people… If you think about western civilization… And Hobbes is sort of considered one of the chief architects of political philosophy out of the west, and Rousseau is another. So, they both looked out at the world and they both saw our world as a little bit scary. And Hobbes idea was that we’re in a state of nature where all is against all. So, we entered the state to create these institutions, to protect ourselves from each other. But then he goes on and he says, but in doing so, we gave up power to the state that’s supposed to protect us from each other. And now we have to protect ourselves from the state.
And as you read him on… He’s obviously brilliant, but he sounds a little bit paranoid. It never stops. Rousseau looks out and sees the world the scary as well. He says that the way you deal with the fear and uncertainty of the world is solidarity. You deal with it by holding onto each other. So, one vision is that the world is scary, therefore it’s all against all. We’re in a constant state of fear. Everybody wants my stuff and so I’ve got to get my gun and my tank and my charged fence and my boundaries and my wall. And then I’m still afraid. Not only am I afraid now, I’m also lonely. So, that strategy constantly tearing us against each other and even against ourselves generates not safety but loneliness. When we think about half the civilian guns in the world are in the United States. But we’re not the most safe country, just the opposite. So, Rousseau says don’t turn on each other, turn toward each other. How do we do that? We need help. We need, as Gisele said, we need institutions. I just did a special on Detroit, our hometown, Rob. In the special, we talked about the wall of… I think it was [inaudible 00:31:31] where they built a wall to keep the black and white community separate in Detroit so they could get along. That wall is still there. That’s the Hobbesian model. And I think Gisele is right.
Really, can we belong to each other? Can we belong without othering? Can we have a we without… As my students and others say, “Well, is that even possible?” That’s the orientation. That’s what we should be reaching for. We don’t know how far we can go in it. And it’s not just a psychological or emotional space. It’s an institutional space. We can create institutions that help us or we can create institutions that hurt us. And Jim Crow [inaudible 00:32:13] and segregation institution that says you don’t belong together. You can’t be together. It’s against the law. How do we turn that around? And the last thing I’ll say on this is that I think we largely squandered the opportunity given to us by the pandemic.
What do I mean by that? The pandemic had lessons to teach us. One lesson was you need to maybe get a shot, you need to maybe have physical distance from each other. But you end this together. The whole world, almost 8 billion people is experiencing this at the same time. There was one period where more than half the world was in lockdown. It’s the first time in human history that’s ever happened. So, it created this possibility to say, what is happening to you affects the person literally and figuratively next to you. You’re not in this alone, you’re constantly impacting each other. So, how do you turn toward each other and resolve this crisis together? That’s the only way we can resolve the crisis. And that’s not just true of the pandemic. It’s true of AI, it’s true of the climate. We’re constantly being pushed to work together. But as you said, Rob, fear gets in the way. So, I think we need help. We need stories. We need examples. We need institutions. We need models. We can bridge, but we have to do it.
Rob Johnson:
Well, the idea that you bring together, which is what I would call, all of these disruptors. Disruptor does not mean bad. It just means profound change. So, technology and the environment, that’s disruptors. These kinds of things, globalization, the notion that the nation, state can manage the wellbeing of its citizens when all of these, how do I say, influences from all around the globe come ripping through the society. All of this is very, very, what you might call, catalytic to fear. And so, the North Star with the declaration of belonging seems to be, to me, the right vaccination for the heart. I was part of it, but the team that you inspired really did a very good job by emphasizing that as the essence.
Gisele Huff:
If I can just add one thing, because we haven’t given enough play to this in my opinion… At the root of all of this is education. Plato in the Republic when he’s describing his perfect ideal society, he says, “Just give me the kids. Let me have the children and I will mold them into the kind of people who will be able to live under the rule of a philosopher king.” And one of the wonderful parts about this report is an a doesn’t call for liberating education. It calls for liberatory education, which keeps on coming up underlined red in documents because it’s not a word that’s accepted, I guess. It’s not recognized by spell check. But liberating means that you are free from the shackles of a rigid traditional education, which is what people are talking about. That’s what the people in my field for 23 years we’re talking about.
But liberatory is a deeper concept. It means educating yourself and keeping track of how you’re learning so that you can adjust, that you can open your mind, that you can listen to other people, and you can make the things that this document calls for happen. You take a five-year-old child or three go shot in preschool, and you train them with that in mind, and you’ll have a different world in a generation. But if you don’t do that, there’s not enough you could do fast enough to get to where you want to be.
john a. powell:
And Rob, let me just put out one other thing. And I’ve been sitting on this and I don’t want to be nitpicking. Actually, I tried to catch this before the final report went out. But I hope this report has resonance, not just in the United States, but the entire world. As we think about the world, we have to remember that the North Star is only in the Northern Hemisphere. So, we may need a slight variation as this report and these ideas travel to the Southern hemisphere.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. The penguins are in the south, and the North Star is in the north. And the Galapagos islands is the only place north of the equator where the penguins thrive. So, we’ve got to create a Galapagos. And I want to come back, Gisele, a little bit to your sense of education, because in the last couple of years, I’ve been doing a lot of work with a group called [Scholaryly Encounters 00:37:44] [forgein 00:37:44] that Pope Francis inspired. And when we get together, he emphasizes that much of the world does not go to college on the order of about 80% of the young people. Second thing, he says, they will drop out of high school to get a wage out of economic anxiety, to help their family or whatever, unless what they learn in school gives them, what you might call, skills and navigation of the context in which they live to better themselves.
And so, his remedy is to empower the young people to tell us what they want to learn, not live downstream in a vertical environment that’s a one-way street where people come in and tell them what they have to learn. And he’s bringing this around and saying, “If we don’t do this and these people drop out, then 80% of the people in the world are not suited to navigate through the fear, address change, understand the difference between expertise and somebody who’s yanking your chain, and democracy cannot thrive. So, education empowered by the yearnings of the young seems to me to be a necessary condition. And I remember in conversations with you and discussions in this report which you might call interactive nature of education, the empowerment of the student is very important.
Gisele Huff:
And existential education too, not just learning things, not just the acquiring of knowledge, but the development of skills and dispositions and experiences where children are put through what it means to be a democracy, put through what it means to punish someone who goes outside the norms… How do you come to a resolution of a problem? What happens when two kids are in strife with each other? How does the community deal with that? This could be built in to the education system every day if only it was structured that way. This is not rocket science. We have plenty of people who understand these things.
And not everyone is an intellectual or can be an intellectual or wants to be an intellectual. Everyone has their own capacity and we shall have room for that. We should, this is what this document says, make room for everybody, acknowledge everybody is deserving to be on this earth. They’re here. They deserve to be here. I remember when I moved from New York where I lived for 30 years and went to the whole social thing in New York. It was the cocktail party in New York. When people started talking to you, they asked you three questions, where do you live, where do you work and where do your children go to school? And unless you answered those questions correctly, they just turned away and moved on. When I moved to San Francisco, those questions were never asked. If I was in the room, I belonged there. There was no need to further identify me. And in the same way, we have to do that to all the people in the world. If they are in this world, they belong there. They don’t have to prove it.
Rob Johnson:
Well, John, you’ll both be very… You can truffle at my divided personality, living in Bolinas and New York city. I crossed those boundaries in what you might call the rituals of the game, of what allows you… If you could read a poem, you’re pretty good in Bolinas. And like you said, schools, credentials, who you work with in New York is more the currency of entry pass or whatever to a conversation.
john a. powell:
Well, I think that’s right. I want to just underline what Gisele said, maybe even push it a little bit further because today people think… We shifted at some point from thinking of education from Jefferson’s idea of making people citizens. What was he talking about? Learn to take someone else’s perspective. He’s talking about bridging. That’s what bridging is, learning to hear someone else. At one level, education has become technical training. We learn how to do things. We don’t learn how to live together. Those are two different skills. And so, today we’ve spent much more time educating the mind and not educating the heart. And Gisele point is that everybody belongs. Everybody belongs. It’s not provisional. It’s not like you belong if you go to a fancy school or you belong if you’ve got a fancy degree or you belong if you have enough money. Everybody belongs.
That’s what we have to understand. And then how do we live that out? How do we make that real? How do we say every child that borns is deserving? Every one of them, not just black ones, not just white ones, but everyone. That’s what’s really tearing us apart, is that we’re saying some people are deserving and some people are undeserving. And we do that by race. We do it by religion. We do it by nationality. We do it by neighborhood. And so, to me, that’s the real part of education that’s problematic.
I’m at Berkeley grade school. But too often, not just Berkeley, Stanford, sometimes we’re very proud of our engineering department, and we should be, but we’re not so proud of our sociology and psychological department. We’re not doing, Rob, what you said in terms of that book, Nonviolent Communication. How do we learn to talk to people who disagree with us? How do we learn to hold onto each others humanity? That’s the hard lesson. And so, we have to broaden education to really talk about connecting, to talk about love, to talk about everybody belonging. And so, it’s not just a insipid concept. It actually has meaning.
Rob Johnson:
Yep. I often in this podcast recently around these themes [inaudible 00:44:27] the late Jane Jacobs final book in 2004, it was called Dark Age Ahead. And chapter three was called, education, excuse me, educating versus credentializing. And it dealt with exactly, what you might call, that different purpose, that becoming an input to production. People like Sir Kenneth Robinson, who’s got the most famous Ted talk of all time, How schools kill creativity… I saw an RSA Animate about one of his speeches about when you take out, how would I say, the criteria for your genius and you test children in kindergarten, 70% to 80% show the potential to be a genius. By the time they’re in 10th grade, it’s less than 5% because the nature of what learning and education means is so narrow.
And as you mentioned, it’s head-based, not heart-based. There’s a wonderful book by a man in South Bend, Indiana who used to be a lawyer, and I think then worked with the ministry for a while, and it’s called The Lost Art of Heart Navigation. His name is Jeff D. Nixa, and he gets right to the core of the kind of things that I was able to sit at a Zoom lens and grin about as your group was talking and as you just emphasized yourself.
And I think this is part of an awakening. I want to take it to a place that isn’t in our report, but something that affects, I would say, INET quite a lot. As you know, we’ve had a lot of interaction with Asia. And I have a friend who is a great scholar on the foreign policy and so forth named Patrick Lawrence. He wrote the book in 2011, I believe. It was called Somebody Else’s Century. He was a protege of Chalmers Johnson who had been at University of California, Berkeley, and wrote all about Japan.
But his theme is that notion of we and all of us lose in Eastern philosophy, whether it’s Japan or India or China or whatever. He’s not going to accept what you might call the market-based [inaudible 00:46:38] individualist model, the self-protective alone, me and the market model that is prevailing in the United States. I think we’re at a crossroads in terms of what you might call defining the North Star for world leadership. I think the United States is being challenged. If your North Star was not just words, but the modus operand of this country, I think our coalition would be broadening rather than narrowing.
But that contrast that Lawrence puts out between Eastern philosophy, which has a lot more heart-based elements to it, the [forgein 00:47:15] and other things, or some parts of Indian philosophy and what I’ll call Cartesian logical thinking. It’s a big challenge and opening up education in those realms, which Gisele I think you would agree Northern California does a better job of than New York city or probably put Detroit on the same side as New York city in that regard. But this notion of education and the resilience of the spirit of our citizens in defining and enforcing and actively yearning for that North Star, education is a essential ingredient.
john a. powell:
And education comes in many different forms, formerly and otherwise. My father died recently. Some may have heard me talking about him. He was 99 years old. There’s some indication that he died of COVID, but it was at the beginning so people weren’t looking for it. He grew up in the south like a lot of black people that Isabel Wilkerson talk about in The Warmth of Other Suns. He was a sharecropper. So, he dropped out of school in the third grade, but he was one of the wisest and kindness and loving people I’ve ever met. He had the kind of education that we all should really reach toward. And I think of another book. There’s a book called Somebody Else’s Children. And the gist of it is that we don’t have the responsibility. It’s a provocation. Are we responsible for educating somebody else’s children? And on one hand, there’s no such thing as somebody else’s children. They’re all of our children.
Gisele Huff:
Well, the basis for the fact that the human species has been able to get as far as it has. We fly, we swim under water. Technology has gotten us there, but the reason we’ve gotten there is because of collaboration, not competition in the economic sense. But in terms of producing these things, it’s all by collaboration. That’s in our DNA. We wouldn’t have survived as a species if we didn’t collaborate together. Unfortunately, it’s led us to world wars and all kinds of other wars, but it is in our DNA to collaborate in order to survive. And we have to make that the lodestone of our movement forward. We have to emphasize that every time in order to get to the point where we understand that it requires everyone’s collaboration, everyone, in order to get anywhere. We stand on the shoulders of giants. There’s no way Jeff Bezos would be where he is if he didn’t have all of the rest of history behind him.
Rob Johnson:
I think maybe the reason he got in that rocket is he was looking for the North Star that you guys [inaudible 00:50:30]
john a. powell:
He wanted to buy it. Huh?
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. I want to own the property rights. He and Richard Branson went fishing together. And I think the the questions that you’re raising in that all children are our children is distinct from that kind of inside my walls, the ones that I brought into this world biologically are the only ones I have to care about. That just don’t makes sense. I understand taking care of them. And I understand that sometimes when there are public goods, they get under provided. So, having families step up for their own children is no necessarily a bad thing, but not to the exclusion of the common good. And I think that’s what your report in many different dimensions really brings to life. And-
john a. powell:
And these are radical ideas and they’re not radical at all. Literally, there are five states in the United States that are actually commonwealth. Just think of the term commonwealth. The wealth belongs to us all. Now, we don’t live that anymore. And so, Pennsylvania is a commonwealth. Most people don’t even know that anymore. And to Gisele’s point and a number of books, but including O’Reilly’s book Sapiens, he argues that one reason homo sapiens outperformed neanderthals was not that homo sapiens were bigger or stronger or individually smarter, is that homo sapiens learned to cooperate.
Rob Johnson:
That’s right. There’s gentleman, I think his name is Christakis at Yale, who presented a talk in our San Francisco INET office one day that resonated with exactly the same thing. It’s the capacity to collaborate makes you, in a Darwinistic sense, more likely to survive and thrive, both. Now, for our audience, they’ve been getting a taste of this, but we’re about to release this report. I think sometime around the 8th of September, the day after labor day in the United States and around the world, all of our team can use their social media, this podcast we made. And several of the members of our team will go do a little… I’ll do more podcasts, what I’ll call deep dives, in some of the segments around the North Star vision that you created. There’ll be different neighborhoods in the North Star, I guess, and… Or not necessarily different… All the neighborhoods will be treated the same, but they’ll have different dimensions.
I think this was a fantastic exercise, both just for clarity, but also you’re filling a void. You’re rising to the occasion when the anxiety and the temptation towards otherness and fear is rising. So, in this respect, you were talking about heart-based education. This vision is a vaccination. And I’m curious… As we’ll release this, there’ll be a lot of feedback and exploration. As the two co-founders, do you have a vision of the next chapter after release, after feedback, after, as you hope and we all hope, it engages the world quite vigorously? What’s the next play?
Gisele Huff:
In the best of all worlds, this would precipitate the creation of groups of people who could talk to each other. There was something going on in the 19th century like that [inaudible 00:54:40] or… I can’t remember the name of it. The name escapes me. But it was a way of people to get together like book clubs, right, but on a much, much deeper and more important topic. I would hope it would start a movement that brought people together. There is something called Better Angels that I [inaudible 00:55:11] sort of it. But I don’t know where it stands now. But a couple of three years ago it was launched and started getting some play. I haven’t heard much about them since the pandemic. Again, not being able to get together is a big drawback.
We need a national conversation about this. We need to be able to bring people in to this. People of faith, people who run congregations, I would turn to them in the first place to bring different congregations together because they have a moral standing with the people in the congregation. I would make it a discussion in high school classes. If we can get it into the curriculum somehow, it would be another way of getting young people, giving them the vision from the get-go because they’re the future. Without them, nothing happens.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. And John, I want to reinforce your point from earlier. Within the nation, within the communities where we start to build, your hope was that this probably helps us see the North Star as a global community. And I will say that is not only important, it may be necessary because I’ve talked about that ring at the beginning, the healthy planet. We’re not going to get there unless we cooperate to create the health and planet. We’re not going to inspire community. We’re not going to take advantage of the learning from people from different places around the world and different experiences. So, there’s a great deal at stake about this kind of vision, this notion titled, the foundations for a better society. I think we all agree. They have to reach far beyond the borders of the United States, but the United States having been the metronome of a world system since World War II is the essential starting gate.
john a. powell:
I agree. I agree. And going back to what Gisele said, belonging is the key. How do we learn to really belong to each other, how do we learn to belong to the earth, not dominate each other, not bludgeoning each other into submission? And belonging is not simply saying belong in your own family. I agree with you, Rob, family is important, but we have to extend that. How do you learn to belong to people who disagree with us? How can you disagree with me and still be my friend? How can you disagree with me and I still love you and you still love me? How can you disagree each and still collaborate? Those are some of the things we have to learn.
Instead, we sometimes just emphasize there’s one winner, everybody else losers. We do that in our political system. We do it in our legal system. We do that with kids. So, I do think people want something different. And I think they’re hearkening for it. So, if we can have these conversations, these experimentations across the country, across the world… If you think about a lot of the tech stuff that’s coming up, a lot of it was designed with the hope this would connect people, and it does. But it’s also been used to divide people. And so, I would also maybe look to the tech industry and say, “Okay, you have this tremendous platform. It could be for good or bad.” Right now, the jury is out. There’s a lot of good stuff. But as you said, Rob, there’s a lot of bad stuff as well. How do you begin to deal with that?
And then finally, I would say, the imagination. We think about the past, and most of the time it’s an imagined past because most of us are not real historians. We think about the past, we imagined the past, what it was like. But we don’t spend enough time imagining and thinking about the future. And I think it’s not just imagining, how do we actually then build toward, work toward, orient toward the future. [inaudible 00:59:47] I was saying that if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there. So, we have to have a sense of the future that we want and then begin to work to make that future a reality as soon as we can.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. Well, I’m going to use your reference to my musical background, and I’m going to take responsibility for creating the soundtrack that goes with this report. And I can feel already the Aretha Franklin song in the film, Amazing Grace. It’s a Marvin Gaye song, Wholy Holy. It’s like we have to band together. We have to believe in each other’s dreams. But if you said to me from all my experience related to music and traveling the world… When I sailed over the world, I told my children I wanted them to see places where there were no roads and no airstrips so they could see what mother nature really was about.
But I’d say, even more importantly, and I was being a little facetious in this regard… I said, I wanted them to understand that the most popular musicians on earth were not the Beatles, it was Bob Marley and the Wailers. And Bob Marley’s song, One love, one heart, let’s get together and feel all right. I’m pleading to mankind. One love. What about the one heart? Give thanks and praise to the Lord and I will feel all right. Let’s get together and feel all right. Let’s get together and feel all right. That might be the song that kicks off our presentation because Bob Marley, I think, was the artist who fused politics, criticism, disagreement, all the kinds of thing, and love better than any artists that I’ve ever experienced.
So, I think to conclude, I look forward to reaching out to some of our colleagues. Again, on September 8th, we’re going to release this report. And we will have opportunity for lots of discussion, webinars and so forth. I know INET, I know your institute will all be taking part in elevating this. But to close today, I just want to thank the two of you. Thank you for your vision, for your inspiration, for your effort, for including me. This has been a great experience.
john a. powell:
Well, thank you Rob. It’s been great to [inaudible 01:02:30] in this hour, but also this project has been wonderful. And so, I want to thank all those who participated and all those who will help make the future someplace where it’s a great place to live. But a special thanks to Gisele for really spearheading this with her energy and insight and wisdom.
Gisele Huff:
Thank you both. And thank you, John, for helping me get this off the ground. And, Rob, I’ve told you how much I appreciate what you’re doing now and how we’ve taken hold of this and how you are planning to congregate it. There’s no way I could do that. So, the fact that you’re willing to do it and that you’re so taken with this project is just incredible to me.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. I’m sure, Gisele, with your vitality, John’s expertise, there’ll be many more times I stand up to promote your insights. They’re really, really extraordinary. Anyway, thanks for today. To be continued.
john a. powell:
Okay.
Gisele Huff:
[crosstalk 01:03:35]
Rob Johnson:
Have fun.
And check out more from the Institute for New Economic Thinking at ineteconomics.org
