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Thank you
One of the first things that I feel as I have to do is to help you see the whole phrase of socratic practice, fresh
I understand that in UFM we've been doing things there are called socratic practice
and many wonderful things have happened, but maybe there is some confusion
all over the world the term "socratic" has this heavy overtone of some, old, dead-gray,
Greek guy on a marbled face and so forth,
and it's hard to really get excited about that as a disruptive technology
so, I'm going to try to help you see things fresh. For me, what I love most, what I'm most fascinated about,
is creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship
and you might say what does socratic practice have to do with creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship?
I'm going to start by telling you a little story from Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers,
he describes a situation in which a Korean jetliner
is flying in the dark and bad weather in the middle of the Pacific headed towards an island,
and the co-pilot senses something wrong and he says to the pilot
something like "perhaps Sir, you ought to check your gage"
and then the pilot just keeps going and he doesn't pay any attention
a little bit later the co-pilot says "I wonder if we maybe should check the gage"
you know, and this goes a couple of times, and then, the plane crashes into a mountain,
and everybody is dead...
and, you know, it's horrible. But, what Gladwell says is that,
they discovered that in South Korea it's a very authoritarian and hierarchical society
and as a consequence the co-pilot does not feel comfortable telling the pilot
"Stop look at the gage we are going to die!"
No, just "Well, maybe we'd might consider it" I often stop wonder,
what it does feel like to be that co-pilot, knowing that you're going to die
knowing that everybody in the plane is going to die.
But you don't have the courage within to over-rule the pilot's judgement, or even to bring it up
and for me, is the most strangest interior feeling, I can't even imagine it.
I bring that up, because rightly wrongly, Gladwell cites a study
when he tells that story, that claims that South Korea is the most hierarchical and authoritarian culture on earth,
but Guatemala is number two.
May or may not be true, but I've known a lot of Americans who come down to Guatemala
and they are struck by the respect for authority, and submission to authority, is characteristic and typical here.
So for that reason, I'm specially appreciative of Giancarlo's (Ibárgüen),
I would say visionary leadership in introducing socratic practice in the UFM because I believe
at the first time there's been a deliberated, orchestrated, concentrated attempt through a major institution in a country,
to shift norms away from submission to those sorts of
hierarchies and authorities towards thinking for yourself. So whether or not it works,
I think it's a brilliant and beautiful experiment, and I just wanted to acknowledge that early on.
On a shift now to a different context, I want to go way back to Ancient Greece, and instead of Socrates,
I want to go early to Antigone.
Antigone, famous Greek place, Sophocles a legend separate from that, and in the play of Antigone, her uncle,
Creon has gone to war with Polynices, his brother and killed Polynices.
Polynices is dead on battlefield and Creon, because he blew Polynices betrayed him,
has declared that Polynices' body must be left to rotten and eaten by the vultures, ugly scene.
Antigone didn't like this. She says, according to divine law, we must bury your dead, it's a sacred law to bury your dead.
But Creon said "No, this guy betrayed me", we're not burying him, let the vultures eat him.
The chorus in Greek plays, often can go back and forth to evaluates, and the chorus in play of Antigone is full of:
"Gosh, we need to respect our king Creon, but Gosh, divine law? Really does say bury the dead, what are we going to do?"
I bring this up as a very early incident and what I've would call the "history of individuality" or
"the history of consciousness", in a sense in the very very beginnings of independent thought
The man named Julian Jaynes, who wrote the book called The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind,
and according to Jaynes, may or may not be right, but is a great story -so I'm going to keep it-
The right brain, we think of this synthetic, creative brain, you know we dream from the right brain,
according to Jaynes, the right brain is the voice of God and the voice of society, it's the kind of voice that tells you what to do
the left brain is kind of the analytic strategic we think of this, you know, math and verbal-logic,
and so forth reasoning, and according to Jaynes we didn't really become conscious individuals
until we started getting neuronal traffic, from the left and right hemisphere,
and as left and right brain had to start talking to each other a lot more.
and so, in incidents such as Antigone, where divine law, Creon, divine law, Creon,
it's all of sudden: "whoops", gotta go back and forth got to figure this out
and i see that as a really important example of the early origins of thinking for ourselves.
As the Greek chorus, didn't do a great job of that necessarily, but a couple of hundred years later, yet Socrates,
really systematically asking people questions, getting them to think for themselves, of course,
he was put to death for corrupting the young and teaching the young not to believe in the gods of the Polis of the city of Athens,
so, something was going on there, and we'd might say the Athenians were just dumb for putting Socrates to death,
or we might say, we're playing some fundamental stuff,
when we start asking people questions that separate them from the authorities.
but, I want to go to another vignette, this time we are in Harvard in the nineteen-fifties,
and there's an experiment in social psychology, where there is a series of lines, about,
for or five linesof the same length and then one much smaller.
and then, in this experiment we've got about ten people, but nine of them are part of the experiment and only one is the subject,
and the way it goes is, every person is asked: "Are these lines the same size or not?"
and the nine people who know darn-well they're not same size, all say " yes, they're exactly, the same size,
exactly the same size" until they get the last person; they're like"What?"
but it turns out two-thirds, two-thirds of the people in the last position, all say "yep they're the same size",
again as the Korean co-pilot, what are these two-thirds people thinking?
they got to know they are not the same size, but it actually they believed they were the same size,
What's going on here?
One-third of the credit do say "they're not the same size" and those people are usually outraged at everybody else,
"you idiots, can't you see, they are different you know.. Hello!"
so it's a kind of dramatic difference in, on one hand submitting to the group's,
submitting whether an authority above you or a group around you
submitting to the group versus thinking for yourself. Thinking for yourself in a way is such a cliche, having,
you know, everybody thinks that they think for themselves, and nobody would say
"No, I don't think for myself, I let that guy over there think for me" never, you never hear that,
but, when it gets down to it, I think it's much harder to really think for ourselves than we realize,
and we're far more deeply biologically programmed to submit to authorities
whether a society as a whole, or authorities in our lives, be it bosses, or parents, or churches,
or university professors, or the media, or whatever.
I think that it's far more of a struggle to come to our own understanding of who we are and what our role is in the world,
and what we believe is authentically, true, good, and beautiful, than most of us realize.
That's why for me, when I began doing socratic inquiry in the classrooms, I simply,
they were called socratic seminars based on a tradition where I had come from,
but I began called them socratic practice
because, just like any kind of the practice of, you know, learning how to become a better winemaker,
or the practice of learning to play the violin, a practice in ...
is something that you do over and over again in an effort to become excellent at it,
there are standards and aspirations of what you need to do to become truly superb at this practice.
So, for me instead of a either we think let other people think for us, or we think for ourselves,
for me is a lifelong practice to begin to take responsibility for my own learning, my own thought,
my own ideas, and the manifestation, manifesting those ideas in the world at large. Even as I've been doing this for a long time,
I constantly feel pressure
just to be like everybody else, I constantly feel pressure to ...
but I'm always putting myself in the place of, that Korean co-pilot,
or the last person in this experiment of Harvard, you know,
I'm superbly aware of what does that mean to can push out against of this world
it feels like as this huge pressure, be like everybody else. Giving one little example, it may sound silly,
in such way, test this practice... there's a period in my life when i was doing tai chi, ...
If I was a good person I'd still be doing tai chi, but I'm imperfect...
but in one point I was in the Dallas airport with long layover and feeling kind of all messed up,
when I thought, I should really calm down by doing Tai Chi, and, you know, Dallas, full of cowboys,
cowboy hats, big guys, cowboys boots,
okay, I'm going to do this, and so , you know, and I started doing Tai Chi, and at first is like,
"oh, everybody is looking at me, what am I doing? Am I a weirdo?"
but then, you know, I started to get into, and I started to calm down, I thought, you know,
I need to do what is right for me, if this is going to make me calmer and more effective,
when I get to my meeting on the other side, I need to do it, and "Why can't the Dallas cowboys
don't let me to do the Tai Chi?" You know...
You know, but it was one of the interesting experiments and everyone should just try to do,
you think is right for you, no matter what's happening in the world at large
and as you become conscious of when you are submitting the outside authority
versus when you're pushing out against it, you'll gradually become ever more refined at learning,
what levels society is pushing on you and it's and is not really authentically you
and you know, except you, is whether you don't want to be you, maybe you like be in society, and again,
I don't mean to be entirely facetious. One of the texts that I like to use in my starts of
socratic practice in my classrooms is Kant's What is Enlightenment? and he basically says
"We need to have the courage to think for ourselves"
and people that don't think for themselves they either are lazy or cowardly.
And I like to put that in front of groups of students because nobody wants to be lazy
and cowardly it's that kind of like in your face sort of thing, but, sometimes they do kinda say:
"Well why should we have to figure this out, somebody else could figure it out for us", right,
Why don't you just tell us what it means, and I say, okay, and I'm happy to tell you what Kant means,
but if so, I also want the right to tell you what to dress, how to dress, what to religion to believe in,
what political views to have, if you're not going to take responsibility for thinking for yourself,
then I should take responsibility for doing all of your thinking.
Of course, "no no no, I want to know how to dress, and so forth have my own political opinions".
We get into a conversation in which they really start to evaluate who they are
and where they think about themselves and where they don't.
But I don't tell them what Kant means at all,
and one of the ways in which I typically lead socratic discussions is to attempt not to
let students know which way I'm going and things. I've had students turn to me in discussions and say
What answer you want? I don't want any answer, I want you to think for yourself,
I want you to evaluate the evidence, come back to me with whatever the evidence
tells you authentically and then let's talk about your personal relationship with the evidence
and here we are talking the evidence in the text, and the relationship to the evidence in the text
that other students have, and then we compare it, and by means of working together in
an authentic honest conversation, I believe we will come up with more true
and accurate expression of the truth of the good and beautiful
as relates to an accurate understanding of the text, which may sound melodramatic, but it turns out,
that when people authentically try to understand what is going on and they're authentically engaged
in conversations with other people and my experience they do approach a much more accurate understanding of reality.
For me understanding the text is a microcosm of understanding reality. And they also have to learn, again,
have the courage of their own opinions, sometimes people think "Well, that person over there is smart,
I'm dumb, let the smart person tell us what it means."
That's true even if I as the leader don't tell the students what the text means,
they often turn to the kid they think is the smartest. Oh what does that smart person say?
That's what it really means.
But then, as you have these conversations you find very often the so-called "smart person" also doesn't know,
they're missing all kinds of things. And one of the experiences that I try to develop over and over again,
with students, is the fact that, no matter how allegedly smart, expert, mature, whatever people are,
no one can see all of reality, reality is infinitely complex, and because reality is infinitely complex,
each of us has a personal obligation to learn an accurate expression of our relationship with that reality
and tell the world about it.
If you don't tell the world what reality is like for you, you're going to have the equivalent of planes
crashing into mountains. And that's again, a kind of a heavy sort of thing to say, but I really think that,
the world will be a much more happy, peaceful, prosperous, healthy place, when each of us learns
to tell our truth in an honest and respectful manner views to other people.
So, with that in mind, I want to talk about some ways in which I've seen young people disrupted. I've,
often students, when you first start going into a classroom and ask them questions,
without telling them answers, they are frustrated an angry, come on,
"You're supposed to tell us what is going on, we're supposed to learn it, and spit it back to you"
What a stupid game. You don't tell us anything, you're not teaching, you're irresponsible,
you're wasting our time, blah blah blah"
I've heard some remarkable anecdotes about Albert Loan, here at UFM, where early on,
certain students were really frustrated at him for not telling them the answer,
and they're were about ready to mutiny and so forth, this applies both to students of UFM and sometimes Faculty of UFM
and Albert to his credit, kinda stuck by his guns, and bit by bit.
Some of the most resistant students and some of the resistant professors, realized that, in fact it is,
valuable important to be in a situation where the leader puts
responsibility on students for coming up with their own ideas.
And although at first, appears to be, an abdication of responsibility on behalf of Albert,
or myself or any of us that teach this way. Gradually one realizes it's one of the
greatest gifts to be put in place situation in which you have to come up with your own ideas.
And I want to connect that now, to the notion of "ideas changing the world",
UFM was founded on an idea and I believe, no, for me doing Tai Chi in the Dallas airport is a trivial ideal,
putting an idea in this world...
Muso (Manuel F. Ayau) believed in the ideas behind UFM, and those ideas could create prosperity,
eliminate poverty, I think Muso was brilliant and creating a whole institution to
manifest those ideas was brilliant,
Take a different example, you know Steve Jobs, amazing, recently Apple that came in to
the most largely capitalized company in the world beat out Exxon a couple weeks ago, truly amazing,
Steve Jobs, you know, the little hippie kid in the 1970's
and got fired from his company in the high-profile way in the 1980's,
looked like he was totally a loser out of it, late 1990's look like Apple was a dead company.
Now is most successful company on earth, by many measures,
Steve Jobs had an idea and he stuck with it, he had the conviction and the courage of his ideas to make them real,
and this absolutely changed the world with consequences.
Giancarlo has brought both, Albert and me down here and other people,
and Giancarlo supported the socratic program in the face of a culture that was often very resistant,
a culture that often felt more comfortable with hierarchy and authority than a culture where people
were comfortable discussing ideas and defending their ideas openly.
I think Giancarlo is a powerful visionary for doing that. If, you know, UFM continues to do this,
I see UFM really being in the first case where the culture of exchange from authoritarian perhaps
one of the most authoritarian on earth, to one in which there was a vibrant,
I will say Silicon Valley of intellectual expression where people became creative
innovative and entrepreneurial by means of thinking of their own ideas and manifesting those ideas in reality.
So, finally I want to go back to this feeling inside, what does it feel like,
to have everybody else say the lines are equal when you know they're not, what does it feel like
the co-pilot to know that the plane is about to crash, what does it feel like when you sit
there and you know that something is not right and you're not telling the world that it's not right.
I would say that the ultimate disruptive technology is you. Every time you are an authentic,
honest expression of your own belief in the true, the good and beautiful on whatever issue
no matter how trivial, no matter how profound that if you comment the world as an honest person
and tell us what you believe, not what the authorities have told you, not what society tells you,
but what your inner genius tells you, this is what is real about the world.
Then you are the disruptive technology that will change the world,
and as cool as iPads are, you are even cooler than iPads.
Thank you.