FTP127: Nora Bateson – Healing A Disintegrating Society

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We invited Nora Bateson back on the show for another sensemaking conversation. Nora Bateson is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, educator, and the President of the International Bateson Institute.

We wanted to hear her views on the current disintegration of societal systems, and how to navigate the chaos of the world.

We talk about how to raise and educate children for the uncertain future, and how to find the potential for healing and transformation in these difficult times. She also shares some thought provoking quotes from her father Gregory Bateson’s writings.

In This Episode of Future Thinkers:

• How to educate children to succeed but not to be attached to the current system
• Why it is harmful to create scenarios for the future
• How inter-generational relationships represent mutually responsive complex systems
• Learning to be in the state of uncertainty
• What consistencies of the current systems are being broken right now
• What is a tautology and how to apply it to the current societal system
• The process of going from independent to interdependent systems
• How to make sense of the “violence of healing”
• Information vs. transformation and how these two notions relate
• To what extent free will and agency exist at all at this moment
• What is “X + 1” concept and how to apply it to the current state of the world

Links and Resources Mentioned In This Episode:

• The International Bateson Institute
• An Ecology of Mind, a documentary film by Nora Bateson

Recommended Books:

• Mind And Nature: A Necessary Unity by Gregory Bateson
• Small Arcs of Larger Circles by Nora Bateson
• Steps to an Ecology of Mind by Gregory Bateson

More From Future Thinkers:

• FTP106, 107: Nora Bateson – The Complexities of Climate Change and Cultural Evolution
• FTP126: Joe Brewer – Regenerating The Earth
• FTP125: Bonnitta Roy – Human Flourishing In The Time of Turmoil
• FTP124: James Ehrlich – Designing Regenerative Villages