What’s the difference between us and them?

Transcript

Transcribed by machine from the recording.

Scott Chris, welcome back to the show. Scott, Scott, we're doing more and more of these. It's great. Yeah, no, it's fun. It's and we are actually Facebook living, too. So it's nobody pay attention to my hair.

Chris We haven't. It's still there are no no barbershops open in London. It's been a while and I'm just rolling with it.

Scott Yeah. Yeah. We're in pandemic. We're in pandemic mode, so there we go. Well, we came off last, so for those of you who know the Atlas Project and are listening regularly, a lot of you have been connected to Basecamp, and we're jokingly, well, not even jokingly, I think we're kind of calling our subtitle for this podcast is now Basecamp Radio.

Chris Basecamp Radio.

Scott And so we, Basecamp is a community of people that are kind of seeking questions and looking to discover new maps and a new world. And we're doing these great online convenings, convening online meetings. And we had a great meeting on Thursday that you, I mean, your framing of the question for us to talk about was so great because it was so blessedly ambiguous. It's like, what's the difference between us and them?

Chris Yeah. It was so wide open. It was wide open. Well, this is something that... So, yeah, I think, you know, Basecamp is... I mean, well, I'll just speak for myself personally, but I think I'm speaking on behalf of a lot of people. It's an important social experiment. Yeah. And, you know, I... I don't have one way of describing it or thinking about it. And I don't know if any of us do because we are in the midst of, you know, I think discovering and also in a sense sort of recovering what this is. But how I was thinking about it this morning over Sunday coffee is kind of like society's second brain. Or maybe its first brain. Where is society's brain? We know that there is all sorts of stuff that is just true at a systemic level. COVID-19 is a great example. The risks for me as an individual are not necessarily the right way to think about what is the right thing to do because there are these things that are true at a social level that work on me.

But how does that social level even think And I think part of it is through gatherings like Basecamp, where there is a kind of diversity there that is not sort of predetermined by we're all part of the same organization or even part of the same community or part of the same demographic.

Scott People do all kinds of things for a living vocationally. It's international. I mean, I had several folks... I invited, and one of my friends just remarked about how helpful, he's from Alabama, he's an attorney, great guy, and how helpful it was to have these non-American voices. Because in America right now, the whole us versus them, I mean, between the politics of COVID-19 and the kind of dialogue about police brutality and racial injustice, it's an intense time in the United States right now. And so to be able to step out of some of that intensity and get some ears and eyes that are in different parts of the world was super helpful for him, just to get some time to reflect. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris And then there's a kind of, you know, so another person I was talking to on it, Dave, who, you know, he's a very senior bureaucrat in the Canadian government. So he's always working on society's interests. I mean, that's kind of his job, and it's a pretty big one. And you think about it, you almost never get to have an encounter with society as a senior bureaucrat that isn't sort of carefully managed and kind of composed. Like, here is a representative sample of It's not actually a good representation of reality because the anomalies are real, too. And that is kind of interesting. Now I'm getting a bit heavy on a Sunday, but we tend to kind of exclude the outliers because they don't fit the model, but they are part of the reality. I find at Basecamp, you get a lot of people who fit the model, who fit the trend line, and then you get a lot of outliers because, of course, outliers also exist.

So it has been, I think, for all of us who are taking part, just a great way to mess with our own echo chambers and just continually... I like the language that biologists use when they talk about populations of species.

Scott Absolutely. As an American right now, I've connected a lot of people from the Basecamp community outside of the meetings and becoming friends with them and they're checking in with me and, how are you doing? The thing as an American right now with Basecamp is that it's such a welcome change of pace because I feel like the whole us versus them question Thanks for watching. You look at the American response to COVID-19 is a disaster. I mean, we are a disaster. Like, we are the wealthiest country in the world. We've got the best scientific research institutions, the best, and we are a nightmare on this.

Chris And some of this is because... You've politicized it the most, or among the most politicized reactions to it.

Scott The most. I mean, I can't think of any...

Chris Well, I think Brazil is maybe one example. So basically, the Americas are having a really tough time orienting politically. But I think of other countries like here in the UK, well, that's maybe a bad example because it's kind of all over the place. But there was a sense when we finally got to it that Boris Johnson said, okay, so this is real and this is kind of above politics. You know, maybe another example, just that I'm familiar with as a Canadian, the Premier of Ontario. So, you know, pretty important Canadian province. Pretty divisive political figure in that province. But again, at least in the early response, they said, like, this is above politics. And so we've got to kind of take a higher approach to this. Now, of course, the devil is in the details and the politics has come back. You know, you see all of that happening. But in the United States, I think you're right that it, from the beginning, has been so politicized that you can't wear a mask without making some kind of statement about what tribe you belong to.

Scott What's interesting, too, about the whole mask phenomenon, right, is that it makes this strange alliance where, okay, if you were against the shutdowns, then you're thinking, well, I don't want to wear a mask either. And I'm thinking, well, if you want the economy to slowly open back up, wearing masks are the key, right? Like these mitigating... It's funny, the people that want a more aggressive strategy to open up the economy are the people, very often, that are against any kind of mitigation. And you think, well, come on, you just have to think about this for a second.

Chris So step back from these specific debates. And there is a real art, I think, to Basecamp, and it's a collective effort to figure out every time we get together, what's the question that we're going to kind of gather around? I mean, I don't know if we'll ever kind of figure out a perfect science for the question that both brings the diversity of us, opens all of us to make a meaningful contribution to it, connects in some meaningful way to what is important. Thank you very much. It immediately is an opportunity to reflect on racism, which of course is a giant global conversation, but it's also an opportunity to reflect on our political tribes. It's also an opportunity to reflect on nationalism, which has been such a giant piece of this COVID thing, right? Like every country

Scott It was within the states in the United States. The states were competing.

Chris I remember, so honestly, just like a little insider, I remember in the early days of March when I was helping a lot of government efforts. And, you know, with the Canadian government, it felt relatively simple because there was this big federal plan. And I mean, it wasn't perfectly coordinated, but there was trust in the federal government that they're not going to work against the provinces. They might not help as best as we want them to. And when I talked to some of my American friends, these big institutions, they said, why can't you do what the Canadians are doing? Just have one big thing, send it all to a big Amazon warehouse. And then they would send me these controversial articles about, well, we're not sure if federal government is going to prioritize the kind of stuff that we think should be prioritized. Is it going to go to customs and immigration enforcement?

Before it goes to frontline healthcare workers and that you have those kind of serious doubts about whether at different levels of government we have even overlapping notions of public interest is really a detriment in a crisis where you kind of like us all to feel like, okay, this has simplified things for the moment. We need to protect these things first and then we'll get down to that. But if you feel like we're on completely different planets in terms of what is essential, then you want to keep the power to protect your definition.

Scott Yeah. We've talked in several episodes of this podcast about social trust, and I think this is just America's social trust is at a huge low. And part of the reason, it gets to the us versus them thing. I heard Francis Fukuyama interviewed last year, the great political scientist and thinker, I think he's, I forget what university he's in, California, but he wrote The End of History, great student of the Liberal Democratic Project. He had a great insight in this interview. He said, what we have in America is more and more ways to self-identify. Right, like racially, culturally, sexually, your pronouns, it's becoming like we have multiple forms of identification for particularity. At the same time, we have fewer and fewer resources of common identity formation. So at the moment when we have this plurality of ways to particularize your identity, we have very little us-ness, right? We have very little that's a we. The we is eroding.

At the same time, you have exponentially increasing forms of making yourself particular. And I'm not saying that the exponential ways of particularizing are a bad thing at all, but it breeds social distrust when... There's not a corresponding sense of, hey, here's how we're in this together. And here's how we're in a shared kind of thing with the multitudes that are within us all. There's this multitude of us. And I think that, you know, when you see a response in America to the pandemic, that you see the cost of that inability to have a common us. It's like some sort of sense of like, we're in this together.

Chris So it'll be great. We need to get a social theorist on the line at some point, because I have so many questions. And one of them is, so there is this kind of exponent, it is such a creative moment for identity formation, right? There is that, and then there is also...

Scott By the way, plug for your book, The Age of Discovery. You talk about this in The Age of Discovery. Where do I talk about it?

Chris I guess I talk about everything.

Scott Well, you talk about in the Renaissance, one of the big challenges is the Renaissance through the Reformation, you have all these new social forms of identity. You have guilds, you have Protestants, monasteries are closing. You have all this new identity formation, right? Which is chaotic and needs to be... This is one of my favorite parts of your book. That was a free plug for your book, by the way.

Chris Age of Discovery, everybody. I appreciate that. Still doing well on Amazon, by the way. It needs to be updated. If you saw my copy of that book when I interviewed you... It was pretty dog-eared, wasn't it?

Scott Well, I had, so this is my way, I've been prepping for interviews for the last couple years. I did post-it notes and write little questions and insights. I probably had 65 post-it notes in that book. It's a great read. Seriously, if you're caught in a pandemic, if you're looking for something to read, it is a great read. It's a fun read. It's intellectual and rigorous without being a kind of...

Chris The advent of print and the printing press moving from an oral to a print culture had a profound effect on identity formation and particularly in the emergence of national identities like we are all French and we are all English because before that if you think about it in oral culture I mean just the differences in dialect and accent between people What kind of make people feel like, well, no, you know, we are us, but you're not really one of us. And then suddenly it all gets rendered in the same text. And you're like, oh, OK, I guess we are all English. And so the emergence of the kind of the modern state, the nation state. All of this was so closely tied to the advent of print, which just made it possible for these much larger imagined communities to come into existence. That's chapter one of every book on the impact of print on identity.

One of the other things, and I remember it being a bit controversial with my co-author, but I thought, Logically, this makes sense because religion is a controversial topic at the best of times. But it seemed like it made sense that if there was a book about sort of just the storms, the rising storms of our second renaissance, that looking at what are the What are the forms of shared experience you're just talking about that have a role to play in society to form a kind of broader sense of we, to expand our circles of paying attention beyond the more narrow identities that we might craft for ourselves? And in that respect, religion has a really important There aren't that many ways left that society forms a broad cohort of people. I mean, like national service, I know like in the US, people like David Brooks have been hammering this idea for years, like there should be a national, everybody goes into national service for a year. From forming a broader sense of we perspective makes total sense.

We don't really have things like that. I suppose primary and secondary schooling is a fairly universal experience, but not even. In complex countries like the United States, every state, maybe even lower level, has its own kind of... Every school board.

Scott It's all local. The United States is all localized.

Chris So so you add it like there's basically what what is there that unites everybody? You know, Super Bowl dancing with the stars. Right. They're very wrong. Right. So right. So, well, that, you know. And so when you come to a moment where we need to kind of really rely upon a civic layer of awareness and you realize that it's not just there waiting to be picked up, it does need to be continually worked on and invested and stuff like that.

Scott Yeah, it's interesting. Ross Douthat from the New York Times wrote this book. A couple years ago called Bad Religion. And he's a kind of conservative Catholic New York Times op-ed writer. But what he talked about was like how in America we had this history of civil religion, right? Which was kind of, there's all these great books about this. Niebuhr was written about this. Will Herzog, a Protestant Catholic Jew. There's so much literature written about this. But he argues things like the Civil Rights Movement were possible. Because there was this shared civic religion, which was non-sectarian. It was kind of this Enlightenment Judeo-Christian sort of imaginative religious language. And he says, you know, what happens when that erodes is you get more of fundamentalism and sectarianism, and you get more kind of flaky, kind of new-agey spirituality that doesn't really contribute to public life. It's kind of individual consumeristic sort of spirituality. And so, I mean, I think that he is right on on this, in that we... And I don't know the, I don't know the, because we can't go back, right? Like, you know, this is the big temptation of everybody that wants to kind of romanticize the past, right? You want to go back. We can't do that. But I'm wondering if there is a kind of new civic religion we can aspire to or kind of get, I mean, and it's interesting because even the Basecamp gatherings seem to have a function a little bit like this. There's a real spirituality.

In the gatherings of questions sort of being more significant than giving all the answers, of kind of valuing every voice in the room, of a kind of emotional as well as intellectual kind of intelligence. And that kind of, I mean, there's a kind of, I mean, it is a sort of ethos, which if we had it at a wider level, I mean, I think it would increase social trust.

Chris Yeah, yeah, civic religion. That's an interesting, write that down. Well, I guess we've recorded it.

Scott It's recorded, baby.

Chris That's another way to think about it as, you know, Basecamp as a civic religion. You know, another way to think of it is a kind of like, you know, sort of TED for the 2020s. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because like TED in the 2000s, I think, you know, it really did, it kind of offered something. Thank you for having me.

Scott Right, it's a flattening out of the TED culture.

Chris TED is a very kind of one-to-many model.

Scott Right, right, this is many-to-many, this is across, yeah.

Chris Yeah, and I think it's also a kind of, you know, I think part of the inevitability of a one-to-many model, which is driven by sort of the analytics of views and how many views you get, is the, like, with the best of intentions, inevitably, the ideas worth spreading becomes the ideas that spread. So it kind of becomes like the, Thank you very much. And posting them somewhere isn't necessarily going to help them to spread because people aren't consuming them. Whereas the conversation's worth having. I think that that's part of why crafting the questions. What are we all going to attend to that maybe we haven't been attending to enough? That is very different. The incentives are very different. We're not trying to get clicks. We're not trying to get views. We're all trying to come away saying to ourselves, that was a conversation worth having. Probably because it's precisely the stuff that isn't bombarding my personalized news feeds because it's popular. It's the stuff that I'm missing.

Scott You talk about needing a social theorist. I think we might, because I do think, again, if theorists are right and social trust is one of the key things for society, if it's going to function well, this is why Scandinavia works so well. They're at the top of the social trust quotient when you look at scales. What I like of Basecamp is there is a kind of high social trust quotient. I don't know these people and yet we connect and I've developed several real friendships with people in different parts of the world and helping them collaborate on projects and things like that. There's a kind of... There's an ethos and DNA in the Basecamp community that I think is just conducive to social trust. The people that come into it have some of the emotional intelligence as well as the intellectual kind of critical inquiry to kind of build social trust. And once you have that, I mean, again, it's remarkable that once you get some social trust, it's remarkable what you're capable of, even as a small community.

Chris I think it's interesting, as I kind of reflect on the conversation that we just had on Thursday around what is the difference between us and them. And I was so worried for the model. I felt like, okay, we're testing it with a question that really invites certainty and confrontation and kind of platform standing and telling your truth. Which Basecamp probably isn't a great space for. You need to come to it with a lot of doubt and a lot of curiosity. Because why else would I listen to these people who I don't normally interact with and they don't do what I do. And yet it went so well. Before we got into the conversation, I was belaboring all of these things to kind of help make it a safe space in an abundance of caution for It wasn't perfect. Inevitably, we are all imperfect at having conversations rather than arguments.

But there was far less disaster and cleanup than I imagined. And I think in part because, as you say, to have any interest in showing up to the conversation You probably are already operating with a pretty high degree of curiosity and a pretty high degree of trust that there do exist people out there like me who want to learn and are genuinely curious about how do you, Scott, think about this stuff? What's your personal experience of this kind of stuff?

Scott Yeah, and there are people that are coming in, yeah, I think that curiosity is the key, right? When you have a collective curiosity mixed with social trust, I mean, that's kind of a cultural, it's cultural dynamite in the sense of, I mean, you really, with that collective curiosity and a high social trust quotient, There's a lot you're capable of doing in the world. There's a lot of conversations that are spurred. I mean, it's interesting. I remember this one kind of Christian psychologist. I read a book of his years ago, and he said something that stuck out in the book. It's the one sentence that stuck out for me. He said, most people in crisis don't need information. They need imagination. And I think that's really true, right? We don't need more data points, right? We need a capacity to reimagine what's in front of us where we see, oh, it's either this or this. Oh, no, it's not just this or this. There's eight choices before us. Or there are nine paths we could go down, or maybe 12 or 14. And I think that's part of the curiosity with the social trust. It offers a space for a kind of collective imagination, for reimagining possibilities. And I think imagination is always more powerful than information.

Right, because of sort of, you know, you have confirmation bias, you manipulate data, all things. Imagination is what gets you out of some of those gridlocks and logjams into a place where you can reimagine, you can re-kind of configure the possibilities for conversation and change.

Chris Okay, two things I have to say, and I don't want to forget either one of them. One is on social trust, so I think... One of my hypotheses is key to Basecamp working and why it's working is it has to be a nonprofit. There is also tremendous, I think, social cynicism out there. And particularly around anything that kind of builds a community. I mean, we have such a learned experience of giving ourselves to build up a platform, which then creates these sort of demons. That wreck our society. That exacerbate economic inequality where we feel that we kind of got the short end of the stick or whatever. And being a non-profit actually isn't enough. With more resources, if anybody's listening, we need some of the world's best experts in the charitable architecture. At least that's set the right way so that what we're collectively building is a perpetual gift to humanity. And it's interesting because, you know, it also needs to be held long enough that the DNA, that what emerges is the right thing, even if we don't know exactly what the boundaries of it need to be. I mean, there's just so many forces in the world that want to, oh, great, I know how to monetize that. And then very quickly, instead of becoming a really helpful and important and necessary space, like a kind of public space, it becomes something lesser.

But I think that having that clear intention stated over and over again is a necessary part of how all of us combat our own cynicism, that it's possible to create a kind of non-aligned, a little anarchic space that enables us to have these conversations that are missing, to have conversations that matter.

Scott Yeah, I'll tell you, I've been part of a movement, yeah, I think you should call it a movement, called the Emerging Church Movement. And some of my friends started it in the United States, and there are parallel expressions in New Zealand and Australia and the UK. But it was basically people mostly... Gen Xers and Millennials who were trying to reconfigure religious community. And it got a lot flatter. It got a lot less insider-outsider. They reexamined old symbols and things like that. And it's been a dynamic. They were able to get beyond some sort of tribal polarities in the right-left American culture with some of these moves. And it became a really interesting, like what you're saying, kind of architectural project where they were reconstructing religious communities, trying to get I think there's a kind of like parallel here in Basecamp. It's sort of trying to build a culture that gets us out of some of the log jams that we're finding primarily in the West, but all over the world. I mean, like, you know, there's people, it's a global community, but, you know.

It's interesting, and I think it's uniquely suited to do that, which is why it's an exciting thing to be a part of. I mean, when I come away from these meetings, I get excited about, like, wow, I've been, you're right, I've been in a social experiment where, wow, what if this kind of caught on? What if this was like a positive COVID-19, positive viral kind of thing where people were building these kind of communities where reimagination and social trust and questioning and map-making were really happening? It's an exciting thing.

Chris Are you familiar at all with Ivan Illich?

Scott Ivan Illich, the character in The Brothers Karamazov?

Chris He was this 20th century polymath. He was a Roman Catholic priest, which is where I thought you might be, but also a historian, a writer, a critic of institutions in Western culture. He was Austrian, died in maybe 2002. I'm trying to remember. What the book was that anyway, the reason I'm thinking of Ivan Illich is he's the one who talked about he said organizations serve themselves. I'm looking for I'm not quoting. I'm paraphrasing somebody who's quoting him. It is impossible to resist the temptation to state that organizations, with rare exceptions, tend to self-protect and self-preserve by protecting the status quo and the interests of those in power, often turning against those they claim to serve. Like now, the big trend and the fashion in business is to be a purpose-driven organization. It used to be vision, mission, now it's purpose. What is the social purpose of our organization? And Ivan Illich would say that, yeah, that sounds nice, but the reality, if you look at what people's behaviors are, where they put their time, energy, resources, is most of it all goes to serving the organization and its interests. And if you actually try to serve the purpose, that tends to be kind of subversive.

To serve the actual intended purpose, you have to be subversive within the organization. So I think you talk about this religious revival. I think that's kind of exactly what they're responding to. It's like all of these organized religions, it becomes about serving the institution. And where is the public? Where is the faith community that this is all meant to be about?

Scott Reaching out. William Temple, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, said the church is the only organization that exists solely for the benefit of its non-members. But what happens inevitably is you get more concerned with the Organ Fund and the Altar Guild and this thing and that thing. And then it becomes the gravitational pull for any organization internally is so deep and powerful. I mean, the centrifugal force to pull you into, it's almost inescapable. And so I think that... Which is interesting because I think it seems like in your kind of launching of Basecamp, you've tried to sort of build in something into the DNA. We're like, hey, we're looking past Basecamp here. We're a community that's looking out to the world and our conversations are kind of serving a reimagined possibilities. We're not just here like, we're at a campfire not just for the campfire's sake. We're not going to sort of build a wall around the campfire. But the campfire is immovable feasts. It's a kind of thing that's meant to be serving a wider world.

Chris That's why for myself, and I appreciate that it's more common to talk about organizations or to talk about movements. That's how people understand what is this thing. But I don't use those words to describe it. And I think the phrase that I've used most often is a social experiment. And I think that there is something about thinking of it not as an organization, not as a foundation, not as a movement, but as an experiment. And one of the, you know, one of the features of an experiment is it's kind of, it's all hypothesis, right? You're collecting data and whatever you decide, you know, whatever you kind of set up is provisional, right? So even on Thursday when I'm talking about, you know, we have these rules, we have these principles, and this isn't a definitive list. And there's never going to be a definitive list because every time we do this, we're all learning here. It's a learning community, maybe another way to think about it. But anyway, we all have to read our Ivan Illich because I think he said something that's quite true, just about with the best intentions, as any kind of effort grows and then needs to kind of bring people in and then needs to get coordinated and stuff like that, it starts to have a life of its own and a need of its own.

Anyway, the other thing I wanted to come back to, and this is coming way back, but when you talked about, you know, we have enough data, what we need is more imagination. I think, you know, with this pandemic threat, you know, certainly like the Dr. Fauci's of the world would completely disagree with you and say, there is so much more data that we need. If we had all of the local level data I wish we had, Thank you for your time today. Then you need a society that is okay. I mean, we talk about us and them. You get to go back to work, Scott, but Chris, you have to stay at home. And that's nothing to do with you. It has to do with, you know, it could be the nature of your work versus the nature of mine and the ability to social distance while we do it. It could have to do with hospital bed capacity in your neighborhood versus mine. You know, all of these different factors, if we had the data, would factor into where is it safe and where is it riskier to do things. But if...

If there's not a very, very strong sense of a kind of more global we, where the costs and benefits of some getting their freedoms back before others are all going to even out in the end, then it's impossible to act on that data.

Scott Yeah, and just data, all the data in the world tells us that wearing masks prevents the spread of the virus. But we can't reimagine the mask right now. We're caught in this political thing where like, if you're Republican, I was just watching Fox News Sunday and they were saying 77% of Democrats say they're wearing masks outside versus 50% of Republicans or something. This thing, the data is clear, right? This is a basic mitigation factor. And yet we can't imagine, it becomes this political symbol and we gotta reimagine it. So it's not this polarizing symbol, but it's sort of something that we can do together.

Chris The we of that phrase, we can do, is abstract. And so that's the challenge, right? And I mean, there's so many anecdotal cases of, but like when somebody in my family gets it, then suddenly, you know... Then it becomes concrete. Just to connect it back to, in a way, how dastardly is nature to pick now to challenge how good are we at imagining a global world? Because if you think about it, I drew this really crappy picture, but maybe we can turn it into something. So if there's this magical thing called consensus in the middle, and then this is a really bad picture, but I was thinking there are kind of three forces that are tearing consensus apart right now. One is you talked about just the kind of the identity entrepreneurship that is possible today. The other is like... I can imagine myself as a different we, but whether I imagine them or not, they have real effect.

I feel like it's a separate thing, just like societal upheaval, you know, like, you know, technological change. So similarly, like the Gutenberg press, right? Like we have these new mediums and, you know, Marshall McLuhan was so popular for saying that the medium is the message that, that how we, our understanding of reality is shaped by the media environment that we float in.

Scott And we don't understand the consequences, just like Gutenberg didn't. Gutenberg was a pious Catholic. He would have never wanted to invent something that undermined the authority of the church, but he did. I mean, the Reformation wasn't possible without the printing press.

Chris And that's just one dimension of societal upheaval, right? I mean, like, environmentalists would talk about, like, COVID-19 was a nature crisis, by the way. These bugs, they come out of a stressed ecosystem. They don't just drop from the sky randomly. There's good science about how nature is struggling. Thanks for watching. And it's turning into such a powerful analogy to make sense of the moment that we're in. Like, you know, obviously drugs, but the occult and witchcraft and, you know, psychotic, all this kind of, you know, weirdness. But he talks as a social theorist about how, like, this didn't just happen randomly in that decade because, but it happened because there was just this, I love this phrase, ruins of consensus. And in the ruins of consensus, In the 70s, you had this explosion of new subcultures, of visionary communities, which is maybe what Basecamp is. It's kind of an inevitable response to the ruins of consensus and how we try to cope with that.

And reborn selves. So to think about the ruins of consensus in the 70s and all of this sort of identity innovation that went on to kind of find a new stable sense-making, basically. And on the same page compares it to the citizen ideal forged in the 1950s of the rational individual, white and male, who blended self-sufficiency and well-defined social commitments. And that was over. Now I don't really, I'm not a student of the 50s, so I don't know if that's an accurate summary of kind of how it felt. And so it's interesting to think of just how far society is in this moment from an ideal of a citizen.

Scott Yeah, and something you say here that gives me hope is that seeing Basecamp as a response to this corruption of consensus, which is, you know, it's the flip side of the tribalism. We're like, okay, maybe we're tired of the tribalism. And a social experiment like Basecamp is a sort of reaction to the sort of gridlock, unimaginative tribalism. And it's like, okay, this is a response, an imaginative response to that.

Chris I'm sure like in five, 10, 50 years, anthropologists and social scientists will look back on the 20s and things like Basecamp, which maybe becomes quite influential as a social space. We'll be totally obvious outgrowths, right? Just the digital balkanization of people's media leading to a let's swing the pendulum back and a hunger for just analog connection with real people. We are most hungry for the nutrients that we aren't getting. It's also very interesting that maybe in that sense it's not surprising the politicization of this coronavirus because it is this kind of opportunity to really connect with how hungry people are for some better sense of community. But then it quickly becomes, but whose community? And what community? And I'm not surprised that kind of any identity movement right now, it's like a match in a dry field, right? Because that's what all of our focus is on right now is, you know, what are the boundaries of community? Who is this? Who are we? And who are they?

Scott And that's the interesting thing. Is Basecamp a kind of new form of we-ness? Is it a social experiment in we-ness? That's sort of like we're trying to come up with a we-ness that doesn't preclude a plurality of identity, that doesn't preclude open exploration questions. It's kind of a different, it's a different kind, it's a unique kind of approach to the we-ness question, I think.

Chris Yeah, because it's a, I think it's a community of inquiry, maybe. Yeah, because usually we-ness. So the identity is around the curiosity, and I think it's also- Yes, and that's normally not how we is built.

Scott Right? That's not normally how we-ness is constructed.

Chris I think it's all, yeah, like it's about, and it's, yeah, so it's a we-ness of, I think, yeah, if we could finish this, that would really, if we could finish this, that would really help. It's a we-ness of something different, that's for sure.

Scott Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris And ingredients of that are kind of like, almost just like a personal psychology of a curiosity. Which is to say, kind of, look, we don't have all the answers. And I don't have all the answers either. And therefore, I need a space like this to just sort of help find the stuff that I'm missing. So there's a kind of psychology of curiosity there. And I think there is also a kind of... A kind of psychology of purposeful exploration. To name it Basecamp implies beginning a journey. And I think that pretty much everybody who comes to this, I want to have a conversation that matters. And there is an inherent value in that conversation, but I think there is also an inherent hope Through that conversation, somehow something's going to get better. Instead of solving all the world's problems and coming up with agendas and stuff, it's more about, through these conversations, we're going to start thinking differently, seeing differently, and therefore interacting differently, and ultimately maybe overturn some big ideas. Some big maps out there in the world. That's why we call this the Atlas Project. Why? Because we need a new Atlas. We need to see the maps we're navigating by, figure out what's wrong with them, tear them up, and try to come up with better ones. I think there is a bit of we-ness about that. The world would be a better place if we could all...

Have insights into what's missing from the maps that we're navigating by. And if we could change, if we could fill in those details that are missing and sometimes just tear up the things that are just really wrong, that that would make things better. So it's conversations that matter. And part of why they matter is that there's a sense that these are gonna have a real effect. Even if we don't try to measure it in the way that we tend to try to measure things, the impact of things. We're doing a Basecamp. This will be a really interesting experiment of the model for a public library that's happening in three weeks time. They want to get the community together and talk about what are we discovering about our community through all of this.

Scott And this will be online?

Chris Yeah, it'll be online. Cool. And it'll be for people in that community, right? So it'll have a kind of local flavor. It'll be interesting to experiment with that. But we're gonna Basecamp that question in that community. And then... I like that it's a verb now. We're gonna Basecamp that. Oh, I think it has to be a verb, because we're... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? And then, and I think this part of the model, we decided that there's going to be a six-month check-in, and that's where we're going to start to understand what was the impact of that conversation. What were the journeys, the conversations that began by having that distinctive get-together in the distinctive way with this kind of curiosity? And I really think that that's kind of where we need to be thinking about the impact of this stuff in a very different way. So I'm about to send today kind of the output conversation starters, the gems of insight that came from everybody who was on Thursday's Basecamp. And it was interesting how, you know, what people took away.

It wasn't that hard at all to find a kind of There were questions about division and how and why are we divided. And there were questions about inclusion. How do we create greater inclusion both for what we do personally and also what we do out in the world? And ultimately, the impact of having that conversation will be if sending this document out to everybody who took part in it And look and say, wow, now I see some further conversations I want to have. This is what's begun. Having that conversation that matters, this is what I can do with it now. This is the door that it opens.

Scott And if you want to be a part of this, if you're a listener and you're not connected to Basecamp, send us an email. You can do it right through the podcast site, and we will tell you how to get connected. Because yours is a voice, if you're about a community of curiosity and inquiry and discovery together, that we need your voice around the campfire.

Chris So we'd love to have you. The joy of every Basecamp is the new faces.

Scott Oh, yeah, no, it's fantastic. I mean, I talked with several people who I invited, and I was so gratified by getting the response, because I just kind of knew they had the kind of curiosity and passion for this community. And so, like, it was this, like, kind of beaming sensation in me that, like, they got it, and it worked, and now they want to come back, and now they want to kind of re-engage. I mean, it was just so, like, I felt like I had given them... I didn't feel like I was a...

Chris Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we hunger most for the nutrients that we're lacking. That's good.

Scott So thanks, my friend, for doing this, for convening these communities, for being a co-host of this podcast, and for being you, my friend.

Chris We're doing it together, but you're- Yeah, it's great.

Scott It's great to not be alone in endeavors. It's great to have- We are far from alone now. Exactly. Exactly, man.

Chris Oh, my God. All right. All right, my friend. Have a good one.