Promoting Cultural Intelligence: Repairing America's Broken Politics

Going Beyond Middle Ground By Seeking Higher Order Solutions for Political Reconciliation

Local is regional and regional is national. And, well, national is transnational is global. It all starts in participating with whatever resources we have and whoever is willing to work with us on our local levels.

Mending The Torn Social Fabric of America

Well, first off, it feels like they’re seeking genuine synthesis between the variety of perspectives that show up in the political spectrum in America.

I like how the Institute of Culture Evolution (ICE) talks about finding higher ground rather than middle ground. So often when we hear discussions about finding reconciliation between the traditional and progressive camps it feels like the talk is pigeonholed into figuring out what one side needs to give up in order to satisfy the other side. And neither side wants to give first, so it’s this stalemate of anger and resentment for all the ways that each side has been wronged by the other side.

That being said, ICE approaches is not as middle ground but as higher ground. We’re not looking to just find a compromise in the middle, instead we’re seeking higher order solutions that take into account the truths of each side and aim to craft solutions that satisfy the needs of the core bedrock values of both sides of the picture.

Another thinker I enjoy listening to, Daniel Schmachtenberger, has espoused similar perspectives on how we may approach improving the co-ordination of society. In the Rebel Wisdom series The War on Sensemaking, Daniel speaks specifically about this point that we need a higher order synthesis between the right and the left, rather than a middle ground and this is only accomplished through enabling dialogue

“When you stop using free speech to encourage healthy dialogues that end up leading to higher-order synthesis and you move into the narrative warfare domain then you're really encouraging that people double down on partial viewpoints.” — Daniel Schmachtenberger

Promoting Cultural Intelligence

Cultural intelligence feels like an apt term for the direction that we need to head as a nation in America. We’ve become foolish and self-deceived when it comes to politics and a push towards overall cultural intelligence would do us good. The solution is never in saying that one side of the political spectrum is right. Rather, the problem lies in the fact that we’ve lost (or maybe never had in the first place) a level of cultural intelligence and perspectival wisdom in how we show up in the political sphere.

Political centrism, however, is not a viable solution because there is very little common ground left to be found. To repair our broken politics, we need to increase our collective cultural intelligence. … And once we see America’s conflicting bedrock values more clearly, we can begin to recognize how these seemingly incompatible values can actually work together. - ICE

Expanding What We Can Value

“We need a collective enlightenment with a base of people who are able to make sense and make meaning out of how to re-structure and reform the information ecology to a point where information is being shared in a democratic way and we’re actually getting a better and more healthy view of both sides and what's actually happening.” — Daniel Schmachtenberger

Another core principle of the organization that really stood out to me was their note on expanding the scope of what we can value. This feels essential because the stalemate between right and left in America seems to have at it’s root this inability to inhabit our value structures.

Again, and I’ll repeat this as many times as is needed, it’s never that one value system is better than another. It’s that every value system is pointing to valid aspects of reality and our political polarization is partially due to the fact that we are so limited in the scope of what we can value. We either side with the lefts values or the right, but what about valuing all of these aspects of the political spectrums.

As ICE has beautifully laid out, there are Four Americas. The just, smart, free and real Americas. Each camp has it’s own set of values, each with their positive and negative qualities.

“Democracy only runs when people are able to see a thesis and anti-thesis and then to make a higher order solution out of it.” - Daniel Schmachtenberger

Polarization is Not Belief Clashing but Reality Clashing

To understand American culture, we need to recognize the basic units of culture, which are worldviews. … Worldviews are coherent sets of values that persist across multiple generations. These large-scale value systems frame reality and provide identity. — ICE

I’ve had this gut feeling for a while now and it’s been confirmed by ICE. That you will never change someone’s core values, let alone through surface level propositional debates. Our core values are the literal construction of the world we inhabit. Our very sense of self and world is rooted in the values we have, which likely also have strong familial attachment ties. It’s absolutely fruitless to try to uproot someone out of their core values and change their position to your core values.

On the other hand, there is an approach that could lead to meaningful cultural change and it involves expanding the scope of what we can value. If you can’t change someone’s values then you might as well seek to genuinely understand why those values are so central to their sense of reality.

Again, the only way forward is to find more complex, higher-order solutions that solve for the four different value structures all at once. That’s when real change happens. We should never ask people to change their values, but rather we should seek to more deeply internalize their values and to propose solutions to them that not only satisfy my value system but also there value system.

Towards a More Mature Society

“The “ah ha” moment of cultural intelligence comes when we see how all these values are needed, not only by our larger society, but by each of us personally. And as we come to appreciate and affirm the entire spectrum of positive values, we literally raise our own consciousness.

Using cultural intelligence does not change the values we hold dear. It strengthens our values and increases our ability to be energized by the motivating power of a wider range of positive values.

The only way to overcome hyperpolarization is to effectively grow out of it by becoming a more mature society. Which means we need to improve American culture across the board by strengthening each worldview’s values, while at the same time constraining each worldview’s negatives. It is thus by increasing our collective cultural intelligence that America can grow into a better version of itself.” - ICE

Overall, what I take from ICE is that we must move towards a more mature version of our American society. We must realize that fighting for values that are limited in nature won’t work and that we must change our approach altogether.

In order to show up in service of this more beautiful future, we must also train ourselves to be fit for service in this world and part of this training involves that we increasing our capacities for holding not only cognitive but also emotional complexity. This is no easy task. It’s something that me and my team at Phoenix Culture are working to craft, starting with the Hero100 and then expanding into entire protocols for human transformation that afford greater degrees of openness, cognitive complexity, emotional intelligence and ultimately, as ICE has suggested, cultural intelligence.

We’re maturing as a civilization and our role involves not only realizing that we can change social-psychological landscapes of everyday life, but actually stepping up and doing so. In other words, the very social fabric of everyday life can and must be intelligently developed. One great place to start is with the fabric of American society and relating more wisely to the multitude of values and worldviews embedded in our culture.

“We need to be stable, flexible, mature versions of ourselves, because we spend our lives playing on an increasingly complex and multi-dimensional arena, where social skills and the quality of our relations make all the difference. Collective and personal meaning-making is another big part of this.” — Hanzi Freinacht