Wherever you go there you are…

Thoughts on ego, empathy, and the challenge of staying open.

There is a quality of human intelligence (and maybe other intelligence yet to be discovered in our world) that is often characterized as openness. For me, it’s a difficult quality to define because I think of it as relying on a jumble of attributes – empathy, lived experience, emotional sensitivity, and (possibly?) genetic predisposition. It’s in our nature to have some quality of empathy but it seems like this empathy is highly variable in the degrees of separation (family, friends, culture/country, human vs other species) that an individual is willing to apply.

Ego seems to me to be the arbiter of our capacity for empathy.  A double edged sword – critical for the organization of one’s life and worldview, but capable of destructively suppressing connectedness to, and dare I say curiosity (and there he goes banging on about curiosity again…) about, the wider world.  I’ve been thinking on this in the context of the very challenging moment in which we are living. Extreme political polarization with its handmaidens, disinformation, fabrication, and lying, existential uncertainties driven by climate change and war – all are having very significant negative effects. The result of this is a kind of anti-openness prevailing in certain communities and broader societies in many parts of the world. People are shutting down in the face of chaos, fear and unpredictability.

Which brings us (pardon my nerdiness) to the Free Energy Principle (FEP). Originally formulated by neuroscientist Karl Friston the FEP has found relevance and application in the broader study of systems – the web of life as I like to call it. The FEP proposes that biological and cognitive systems seek to limit surprise (or free energy) by creating and maintaining predictive models of the world. When these models are repeatedly contradicted—when the world becomes too chaotic, dangerous and complex – people have two coping strategies. The first strategy is the one I hope (in vain?) everyone aspires to, and that is to update one’s model of the world. This requires openness, flexibility, curiosity and an emotional investment in the exploration of connectedness. Unfortunately, too many double down on the existing model, rejecting information that doesn’t fit, clinging to (often) misplaced certainty.

How do we regulate openness and self-preservation in a world out of balance? I don’t have an answer, but I think there’s value in naming and defining the challenge. We all have some heavy lifting to do. Openness is the key, but it requires a willingness to be wrong sometimes, tolerate discomfort (mostly mental), acknowledge and engage with complexity, and embrace ambiguity. I will leave you with a verse (that really gets me every time I read or hear it) from the Broadway play Rent:

“There’s only us, there’s only this
Forget regret, or life is yours to miss
No other path, no other way
No day but today”