Sailing through our Lives in a Complex World
Navigating Uncertainty Together
Good afternoon, fellow traveller, guten Morgen, and a pleasant evening to you!
Thank you for taking this moment with us.
Today, we're sharing some thoughts about this newsletter, exploring the reasons and the context behind this new project.
Our world is a tapestry of complexity. Whilst questions may be simple, answers rarely are. Everything interweaves; cause and effect often lie leagues apart, their connecting threads tangling swiftly in our minds. Hence, our mission: to pose questions and resist the temptation of simple answers. To take positions, yes ā but more importantly, to put these positions up for discussion, remaining open to change. To question. To probe deeper. To embrace the world's complexity whilst trying not to lose our bearings entirely.
Do write to us, stay connected! We look forward to sharing this journey with you.
A Complex World
By
American psychologist Jerome Bruner asserted that narrative is the primary interpretative and cognitive device that humans, as socio-culturally situated subjects, use in their life experience.1. Through storytelling, human beings confer sense and meaning to their experiences, delimiting coordinates of knowledge that guide them through situations, events, and actions. On these foundations, they plan their behaviour.
We need to clarify ourselves, to give and receive explanations. We need to tell in narrative form what happens around us. If this narrative is too complicated, intertwined, and mammoth, we become frightened by the cognitive effort required to untangle the threads, we lose interest in following the story, and abandon it. We then find an alternative story, more stimulating and connected to what we believe in, and therefore more comfortable. As we continue telling ourselves this alternative story, our neurons will create new neural networks, leading us to believe in what we are telling ourselves, transforming it into memories and ultimately into our facts.
Furthermore, when we are told a story that targets our gut feelings and hooks into our fears or values, even unconscious ones, it becomes more likely that accept this story and take it as truth.
This is how conspiracy theories are formed. They often develop a them versus us narrative and include enemies that must be defeated. The well-known chemtrails conspiracy theory, which emerged in the 1990s2, is a good example. You will remember: It claims that powerful entities are controlling the climate and poisoning us with substances released from aircraft at high altitudes. True is that these trails are nothing more than condensation trails caused when hot water vapour from aircraft engine exhaust mixes with cold ambient air in the upper atmosphere.3
It is also true that this condensation can carry heavy metals and pollutants that are merely waste products from aircraft combustion engines. So yes, they partly fuel the greenhouse effect and contribute to air pollution.
This explanation is not exhaustive, but it is certainly more complex than a conspiracy theory, and it does not include a them versus us narrative. That is precisely the point. A complex narrative hurts4 at a cerebral level, requiring significant cognitive effort, often accompanied by a shocking realization such as an involuntary assumption of responsibility. Instead of accusing enemies that must be defeated, we must ask ourselves: is it sustainable how frequently we use aeroplanes to reach our destinations, for pleasure or work?
Simple narratives are typically widely spread through social media, which, as we know, crystallize and polarize people's opinions, targeting their gut feelings and showing them only what they want to see. Here too, complexity reigns supreme: our work and private lives are built upon these networks, about these technical beings, as Carlo Milani defines them in his book Convivial Technologies (sadly only available in Italian for now). Should we therefore eliminate them and return to a form of non-digital primitivism? It is certainly not possible, but it is necessary to understand the human and technological dynamics through which these beings came to light. Understanding these directives means distributing power and knowledge on a large scale, avoiding the technocratic power centralization typical of multinational corporations, to devise a functional conviviality with our devices that relies on local and small social dynamics. Certainly, a complex procedure that, again, requires effort from each of us.
This is the effort we wish to pursue with this newsletter. This is the challenge that ignites us: encountering and grappling with ideas different from our own to forge a new and more articulated thought train ourselves in a kind of communication that can make new connexions flourish.
After all, doubt helps. It costs effort, creates discomfort as it is not a direct and simple solution, but a challenge which creates continuous questions. We live in an increasingly globalized and complex world, and in this complexity, we need to navigate by sight inside and outside ourselves to define the coordinates necessary to build a new society on the brink of a dying one. We therefore want to keep our eyes and minds wide open, building a convivial network with our companions in time and our technological tools, with the peace of heart that comes from knowing that, ultimately, definitive answers do not exist.
Change My Mind!
(Bruner, 1988, 1992)
The theory gained traction after the United States Air Force published a 1996 report titled Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025, which discussed future weather modification systems for military objectives.
The Unpleasantness of Thinking: A Meta-Analytic Review of the Association Between Mental Effort and Negative Affect, Louise David, Eliana Vassena and Erik Bijleveld
Ottima proposta. Faccio fatica con l'inglese, ma ho capito.