Holotopia: Socialized Reality insight

Holotopia: The Socialized Reality insight

Scope

The Enlightenment liberated our ancestors from an unreserved faith in the Scriptures, and empowered them to use their reason to understand their world. It was a revolutionary change of the way in which truth and meaning were created in our societies that made all other revolutions possible. Could a similar advent be in store for us today?

Once again we look at what tends to remain hidden: the foundations on which knowledge is evaluated and developed, which serve as foundation to everything we create, and everything we are.

Insight

Without thinking, from the traditional culture we've adopted a myth, incomparably more subversive than the myth of creation—the myth that the purpose of knowledge is to show us "the reality" as it truly is.

The insight that we are constructing rather than "discovering" is now so well documented and so widely accepted, that we may consider it the state of the art in science and philosophy. But that's only one half of the story.

The other half is that the reality construction has been the tool of choice of traditional socialization—which has been the leading source of renegade power.

We can choose between the following two ways of rendering the situation that resulted.

The visible problems are caused by the failing foundations

One way is to talk about holotopia as doing to knowledge and to our "reality" what architecture did to house construction: We can now consciously found knowledge (instead of building without foundation, on whatever terrain we happen to be)

The evolution of knowledge has brought us in front of the mirror.

The other way is to talk about the metaphorical mirror. The hidden thing here is ourselves. We see ourselves—that we are in the world, not hovering above it and looking at it "objectively". This contains two insights: the ending of the myth of "objectivity" and the beginning of accountability.

Stories

Albert Einstein

Pierre Bourdieu

Action

Rebuilding the foundations.

Stepping through the mirror – with the help of truth by convention and design epistemology.

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