The nonSensemaking of Daniel Schmachtenberger & Rebel Wisdom

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David Nickles, of Psymposia’s Plus Three podcast, unpacks the "sensemaking" of nootropic salesman and "thought leader," Daniel Schmachtenberger, only to find more questions than answers. Replying to a Rebel Wisdom video titled, "If We Don't Fix Sensemaking, We Won't Survive," Nickles highlights a range of vague and questionable assertions in hopes of underscoring how nonsense can masquerade as meaning-making.

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Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically from YouTube's captions, then cleaned up by removing filler words, repeated words and background sounds. It may still contain errors.

[00:01] Hi I'm david nichols and I'm a bit perplexed see I just watched a six minute video entitled if we don't fix sense making we won't survive and not only did the video fail to raise a single point about the existential reality staring us in the face it didn't even attempt to explain how the notion of broken sense making might factor into the unexplored questions of survival claiming that if we don't do x we won't survive is a pretty dramatic assertion that said the bulletin of the atomic scientist doomsday clock currently stands at 100 seconds to midnight reflecting the existential realities of climate change and nuclear war so I was curious what arguments this video might present around sense-making and our chances for survival but there were none to be found instead the video presents self-identified systems thinker and thought leader daniel schmacktenberger attempting to

[01:02] Articulate a problem he sees with the abstract notion of sense-making a problem that might best be described as a lack of seeing eye to eye among some ill-defined collective perhaps humanity as a whole now this framing is interesting coming from rebel wisdom an outlet which might best be labeled an insular collective of self-described meaning makers and adherence to various strains of intellectual dark web or idw thought in 2018 the guardian described rebel wisdom as a newly formed men's collective that hosted such questionable luminaries as jordan peterson the video's description asks why is sensemaking broken what would it mean to fix it and how might we go about it having watched it I have a few thoughts that I'd like to share now I'm aware there are hours of footage of schmacktenberger talking about sensemaking but I haven't seen those the only reason I watched this video is because I've been in discussions with a colleague who's engaged in critiques

[02:03] Of rebel wisdom over the past six months and when it popped up on my youtube feed it caught my attention I know this is just a six minute video but I feel that the issues with the video are less about the length and more about the reductive nature of the type of grand theory of everything approach it presents there's an inherently reductive quality to trying to build a framework that encompasses something as massively abstract as the concept of sense making personally I feel that any work should be able to stand on its own merits and I've treated this video accordingly that said I'm more than happy for referrals to schmacktenberger's other work should counterpoints to any of my questions or critiques exist in his other videos so feel free to leave a comment preferably with a link in a timestamp if you feel that any of the questions or issues I raise have been addressed elsewhere and I'll do my best to engage with them in a future video ultimately there seem to be some contradictions throughout this video so I'm gonna let the video play and then

[03:03] Chime in where I see ill-defined concepts contradictions confused metaphors or just nonsense masquerading as sense making I hope this will prove to be an interesting exploration of some of the empty jargon thrown around by people larping as deep thinkers with big ideas worth considering every empire breaks down right now we have a fully globalized system and it's in the process of breakdown where all of the previous systems did break down but they were localized this one will not continue to actually be able to help influence the rest of the world in a positive direction it just won't it is in kind of a decay process the question is whether it decays into just less and less function and irrelevance or whether it decays and reboots and in order to do that a cultural enlightenment as a prerequisite is necessary

[04:05] So leaving aside questions of how we define fully globalized schmacktenberger asserts that we're witnessing the breakdown of a fully globalized system which means that it will not continue to actually be able to help influence the rest of the world in a positive direction which seems like an odd assertion to make about a fully globalized system after all if it's fully globalized why are we talking about the rest of the world as if it's something separate are we actually discussing something other than the fully globalized world are we discussing industrial civilization american hegemony the so-called western world schmacktenberger doesn't tell us but even if we gloss over that point and just look at the current state of globalization or really at any point in the history of post-world war ii globalization we can find gaping holes in schmacktenberger's assertion that this fully globalized system has influenced the rest of the world in a positive direction if we understand him to mean post-world

[05:05] War ii industrial civilization then we have to acknowledge the mining refining and ecological destruction this is all predicated on if he means american hegemony then we have to examine the militarism and endless wars undergirding that to claim that we're witnessing the decay of a functional system is to deny or at least ignore all of the coercion violence and ecocide that this globalized system is predicated upon to proclaim that this globalized system requires a cultural enlightenment in order to reboot raises more questions than it answers what does it mean to reboot how can a global system actually function in a non-coercive or remotely sustainable manner whose culture is schmacktenberger really discussing when speaking in global terms whose values and or epistemological positions is he prioritizing we don't know because he doesn't tell us is everyone recognizing that collective

[06:06] Choice making has to be based on collective sense making and are we starting to really invest not in doubling down on our own bias but in the capacity to make sense of things well the capacity to understand why other people are thinking the things that they do and the capacity to communicate well so we can coordinate look I'll just come out and share my own biases for the sake of transparent discussion talking about everyone and collective choice making and sense-making strikes me as a vague lowest common denominator approach it's almost as if schmacktenberger feels that the fundamental issue of sensemaking is one of building shared terminology rather than addressing our material conditions but declaring the importance of shared terms and definitions doesn't necessarily allow us to make sense of our material conditions or address issues of class and race so then who is this collective he speaks of and is it even possible for them to agree on terminology is he talking about liberals radicals reactionaries

[07:06] Fascists I can tell you from both personal experience and historical examples that collective action requires a collective that is clear on its goals strategies and tactics ideally that collective is also working towards a shared vision of the world they wish to build which means they should have a shared sense of the strategies and tactics they can use in order to build it for example even if you examine a big tent political movement such as occupy you find that the collective of occupy was constituted by numerous smaller collectives and currents some of which may be incredibly easy to define some of which might be more nebulous but even within occupy you find currents that were unwilling or unable to work with each other at times and these disagreements between collectives within the larger collective were at times quite visible such as when chris hedges called the black block the cancer of occupy and was then thoroughly trounced in a debate with bee traven of the crime think collective check out the video description for a link to that

[08:07] Debate it's a good one put simply schmacktenberger's appeal to collective sensemaking sidesteps the realities of political engagement there are plenty of cases where the issue at hand is a fundamental disagreement over goals strategies or tactics in those cases communication isn't the issue the objective is calling for vague coordination between undefined parties in pursuit of shared sense-making glosses over the main consideration of any collective action determining the objective how to fix collective sense making is a big hard topic and I absolutely can't say that myself or the groups that I work with or anyone I know has the whole thing figured out it's why I want more people to understand both how much it affects all the other problems that you care about and how it's upstream to those and some of the factors contributing to it so that more collective intelligence starts working on various aspects of the solution to me this feels like false modesty in

[09:09] Service to some loose assurance that schmacktenberger and the groups he works with have a general sense of how to start working on various aspects of the solution to what well schmacktenberger just told you all the other problems you care about could it be that this is merely a ploy to get you to project your thoughts and hopes onto his vague ideological scaffolding after all since his scaffolding is upstream of the problems you care about you'll have to engage with him and his ideas if you truly want to address those problems look I get that he doesn't have all the answers no one does but as we've seen and will continue to see he's not actually presenting a sturdy ideologically sound framework for socio-political inquiry or action when we think of the commons we think about some shared aspect of the world that is both a resource that we have shared access to but also some shared stewardship of well the information commons is what is the space of information out

[10:10] There about what is true that informs our capacity to make choices and we can see that just like a smokestack billowing pollution into the air most of what is being put into the information commons is pollution to me schmacktenberger's metaphor of the commons feels somewhat confused and in such a manner that it reveals some of the flaws at the heart of his thinking if information within the so-called information commons is mostly pollution that implies someone's manufacturing information as pollution is best understood as a byproduct of manufacturing therefore it would seem that whatever information landscape he's discussing is not solely the commons as the information pollution is being produced by private property the information smokestack which we have little to no control over furthermore if we apply the lens of capitalist logic and enclosure to schmacktenberger's vague articulation of the commons several aspects snap into

[11:11] Sharper focus first there's the fact that we don't actually have shared stewardship of the information commons in fact we have media monopolies and even if you want to throw in more independent outlets at no point does there appear to be anything approaching shared stewardship among regular people second schmacktenberger fails to reckon with his own metaphor just as pollution requires a polluter misinformation requires misinformers if the information landscape is full of pollution in the form of misinformation this misinformation is emanating from somewhere and for a reason likely because it's profitable to those disseminating it factories don't just spew pollution into the environment for fun they do it in pursuit of profits and that brings us to a crucial realization in the context of schmacktenberger's sense-making metaphor just as titans of industry and the populations they exploit and saddle with pollution have fundamentally different class interests that make them inherently

[12:13] Antagonistic to each other we can't and shouldn't engage in collective sense-making with people intent on polluting the information landscape with misinformation if there are whole chunks of populations that you only have pejorative straw man versions of where you can't explain why they think what they think without making them dumb or bad you should be dubious of your own modeling take in the news that they're taking in for a week right for a day go to mother jones for a day if you're on the right go to breitbart for a day take it in and try to seek if I'm continuously getting this and I what are the issues that I face as a being if I'm really put myself in that person's shoes the wonderfully ironic aspect of this excerpt is that this argument itself is a straw man or at least inexcusably unspecific it also presents a pretty weak appeal to horseshoe theory which asserts that the far left and the far right rather than being at opposite

[13:13] And opposing ends of a linear political continuum closely resemble one another however in doing so it fails to engage with any of the actual arguments underlying the political positions in question schmacktenberger's example of breitbart vs mother jones underscores the silliness of applied horseshoe theory breitbart is an outlet that has demonstrable ties to neo-nazis white supremacists and the alt-right hell they were outed for explicitly courting the alt-right under the direction of noted far-right nationalist steve bannon and have a long track record of disturbing editorial approaches ranging from milo yiannopoulos seeking input and content from white nationalists and neo-nazis to having a black-on-black crime tag for stories whatever you want to say about mother jones which to be fair has been criticized for exploiting interns misinterpreting data about homeless people and promoting values that are perceived to be inconsistent with those of the magazine's namesake mother jones it's not in bed with neo-fascists

[14:14] To underscore that point mother jones responded to criticism for a cutesy title on an article about white supremacist and alt-right leader richard spencer by changing the title and acknowledging its mistake to be honest I don't know enough about schmacktenberger to offer a guess as to why he seems intent on offering breitbart legitimacy but it does seem odd that amidst a video full of vagaries and nondescript assertions his first specific example seems to offer support for a far-right reactionary white supremacist outlet is he really advocating that these are the people we should be engaging with in collective sense making and it's not just so you can empathize with the dumb people it's that there's some actual signal that you might have been missing most all of the positions right now have some signal and a bunch of noise so we want to be able to seek to understand so we can actually get the other humans that we need to be able to coordinate with and that we can get the parts of signal we can be able to see where there's

[15:14] Signal and noise and we can start to synthesize the signal across the space let's stick with the breitbart mother jones comparisons as that's the only specific example schmacktenberger has offered thus far the issue with fascists isn't that they're dumb it's that they're fascists I don't mean fascist as a slur a mean fascist is in a political ideology defined by authoritarian power forcible suppression of opposition and strong regimentation of society personally as someone who belongs to an ethnic group that's frequently targeted by fascists white supremacists and nazis I'm not interested in stepping into fashion shoes to engage in shared sense making the signal to noise analogy doesn't work when we're discussing fascists even if we accept the shaky premise of discussing the collective in the broadest terms and want to make collective sense of global problems we can't work with fascists as they're literally predicated on exterminating sections of the collective

[16:15] This isn't a hypothetical that's up for debate either history is rife with examples of the bloodshed caused when these actors attain even a modicum of power opposing fascists isn't an academic position for people like me it's a real world necessity in order to maintain a degree of safety to that end I find schmacktenberger's assertions in the next section rather disturbing if you feel a combination of outrage scared you know emotional and very certain with a strong kind of enemy hypothesis orientation you have been captured by somebody's narrative warfare and you think it's your own thinking even if you win at a local battle whatever technologies you use to win whatever social tech or infotech or whatever you use to win the other side will reverse engineer and come back and you're just escalating an arms race you're not moving towards real shared sense making and coordination this doesn't mean you never take a position it means that you take a position that is trying not to just continue warfare but trying to elevate the whole

[17:16] Space which requires me understanding the whole space better outrage and fear both serve valid purposes even if they're not states you want to be in perpetually they can both offer insights and benefits in certain circumstances and let's be real it doesn't seem desirable to experience any singular emotional state in perpetuity outrage and fear can clue you into the fact that something [expletive] up is going on cults like nexium use a similar logic to distract their members from the sketchy and abusive actions of their leaders by redirecting their members focus towards their own emotional responses to those actions here schmacktenberger's attempt to invalidate outrage and fear responses raises a significant question does he have anything to gain through this invalidation claiming that any emotional or sensorial experience in the abstract results in a particular predetermined outcome in this case indicating that you've been captured by somebody's narrative warfare isn't sense making it's nonsense in this

[18:16] Case it's a particularly ironic form of nonsense as it seems intended to make people feel scared of being captured by someone else's narrative warfare schmacktenberger appears to be engaging in the very manipulation he's decrying as he attempts to incite emotional responses to his abstract notions of narrative warfare when it comes down to it what does it actually mean to engage in reverse engineering that escalates an arms race away from real shared sense making instead of trying to elevate the whole space through understanding the whole space better perhaps he'll tell us in the next section let's say I want to make sense of the beirut blast or the india china border or whatever it is as far as narratives go there's not one narrative there's usually not even two narratives there might be five or 7 or 11 different kind of narrative clusters there might be a hundred versions but they fall within general clusters and so what I'll usually try to do is do

[19:18] A landscape of what the narrative clusters are first and then I'll try to steal man each narrative like what is the strongest version of arguing that thing that I've been able to see so look for the best thinkers that are representative of those narratives in addition to reading across the space actually seek the more well-grounded and complex views as opposed to the more trending ones I want to find the thinkers that seem most earnest and most well kind of educated and thoughtful across the space and then I want to see where people who have deep expertise and earnestness disagree and then I want to explore the basis of the disagreement so here schmacktenberger explicitly states that he tries to steal man each narrative to the strongest version of itself but this whole video is incredibly vague where have all the steel men gone the only specific names he's dropped are breitbart mother jones the beirut blast and the india-china border

[20:18] And none of those names have come with any substance but this is perhaps the clearest articulation schmacktenberger gives as to what he might mean by engaging in shared sense-making and trying to elevate the whole space through understanding the whole space better but what is the space at various points in my life I've understood the space to refer to particular milieus or subcultures but here schmacktenberger has referred to breitbart mother jones the beirut blast and the india-china border without providing a single detail as to his thoughts on any of them so what space is he discussing is it the entire sense-making space is it the whole world are we learning how to elevate the whole world here and if so what on earth does that mean with his talk of reducing discourse and understandings to narrative clusters and identifying the best thinkers who are supposedly representative of those narratives schmacktenberger unintentionally offers some great insight as to a major failing

[21:19] Of the self-proclaimed sensemakers at rebel wisdom as well as integral theory as a whole or at least the bits and pieces I've encountered ultimately this narrative cluster approach or ken wilbur's similar methodology for crafting integral as I understand it present a massively reductive filter where entire fields of research or discursive debates are summarized with a few supposedly key points now not only does this mean that huge chunks are discarded wholesale it also means that the entire reductive project is being filtered through the subjective value judgments of the human being engaged in that summarization that is the filtering itself is biased put another way the whole project masks the biases blind spots and potential ignorance of the people engaged in creating and labeling the narrative clusters and even if we imagine the person engaged in such filtering to be some mythical truly objective human we still run into the inconvenient reality

[22:20] That when someone tries to reduce areas of understanding in which they're not well versed into key takeaways there's a good likelihood that they'll omit things incorrectly interpret things or just not understand things in the first place unsurprisingly numerous people have critiqued integral for precisely these predictable mistakes and inaccuracies schmacktenberger's confidence in his narrative approach within the context of a video that offers zero specific examples presents a pretty clear case study of how his methodologies result in claims that have similar shortcomings so basically these are a few steps that I would encourage for people on their own to seek to understand the narrative landscape better to seek empiricism better to try to be able to not reject or take entire narratives but be able to look for partial truths to be able to try to aggregate signal across the space to be way more comfortable with uncertainty and that's uncomfortable

[23:22] In a way to say I don't understand the world I live in even in the most consequential areas I just don't understand it at least that I actually feel safer because I know that I don't have confirmation bias making me understand it wrongly I at least have a chance to increase my understanding when I say I don't know because the moment I think that I falsely know now I I'm not even going to be able to learn well this seems like a straw man to me in my experience people already tend to look for insights and partial truths where they can find them and then aggregate meaning and hypotheses as a way of understanding the world around them the notion that schmacktenberger's narrative cluster approach offers a superior or even effective methodology for unbiased sense making in light of this particular video seems like a pretty dubious proposition to me rather it seems like he's urging folks to surrender their own understandings for fear of confirmation bias and because he's got a better objective model for increasing understanding but increasing understanding according

[24:23] To what metrics who knows he never provides an example of increasing his own understanding which again feels odd for someone who just asserted the importance of steel manning it's almost like he's softening people up in order to offer them sources where they might be able to pay money to obtain knowledge that's superior to their false knowing or confirmation biases but wait that would be a pretty cynical thing to do no our ability to make sense of the world is breaking down we're making more and more consequential choices with worse and worse sense making to inform those choices which is kind of running increasingly fast through the woods increasingly blind over the last two years rebel wisdom has interviewed some of the world's top thinkers now we've brought them together for an eight-week online course sensemaking 101 with daniel schmacktenberger diane mucho hamilton

[25:24] John viveki doshin roshi and more improve your sense making develop your sovereignty and join a wider community looking to do the same look I'm not here to sell you a course on making sense of the world I just want to say that to me it looks like these would-be emperors wear no clothes when people claim that they've got the solution to society's problems they're usually looking to sell you something the fact that schmacktenberger's analysis fails to engage with any social or political theory at any point in this video is a major red flag with regards to the merits of his own theory and the fact that the video ends with a sales pitch well do I really need to offer comment on that for more close reading and deconstruction of rebel wisdom's self-proclaimed sense makers check out rebel wisdom and the psychedelic idw and subscribe to this channel to get alerts on future videos we'll be doing more of these rundowns in

[26:25] The coming year in addition to our other projects thanks for watching you