Inner Development Goals: Cultivating Change from the Inside Out
The Great Simplification #144 with Erik Fernholm
The deeper we dive into the complexity of the metacrisis, the more it becomes apparent that the changes we desire in our communities, governments, and societies must start with individual mindsets and behaviors. But what practices can help us cultivate this shift in consciousness?
Today, I talk with Erik Fernholm about The Inner Development Goals, a framework designed to foster the skills and capacities needed to tackle the existential challenges we face. Erik unpacks the nuance and complexities of creating such a massive project, and discusses how he’s used them in his own life to foster personal change.
How can we shift from dominant societal values, like individualism, towards ones rooted in complexity and contextual awareness? Why is it important to share these journeys of personal development and grow together as communities? How can each of us make inner changes in our own lives to reflect a more interdependent and resilient outer world?
In case you missed it…
This week, I was joined by longtime colleagues Tom Murphy and D.J. White for an in-depth exploration of the mounting ecological crises driven by human behavior and unsustainable energy consumption. Together, they offer both scientific insights and personal reflections on trends such as the rapid decline in wild animal populations, the rise of microplastic pollution, the overwhelming scale of human-built mass, and many other facets of this unparalleled time in human history.
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The episodes of recent weeks are really wonderful, keep it up, Nate. This interview with Erik Fernholm was a good antidote to the discussion with Murphy and White of last week, which was both astute and, well, dismal, to put it in a nutshell.
I had many ideas as I listend to Fernholm, and I've already started to learn more about the IDGs. Hats off to Erik for his efforts, and for his thoughtful, indeed profound answers to Nate's Qs.
Nate remarked that the notions of the IDGs should be bundled in a freshman college course of some kind. Developmentally, this is too late. In my experience as a college professor of environmental literacy, we can reach, orient and encourage only a few students who are already attuned to ecology, sustainability and related social issues. The majority of teens and young adults have already been captured by the social and cognitve frames of individualistic hedonism and consumer captialism. At an earlier stage, when core value formation is still in progress, that's when wider, more effective educational intervention is possible - as was recognized decades ago by Maria Montessori and Rudolf Steiner, whose theories are still followed in Montessori / Steiner / Waldorf schools. I assume similar theories are practiced in what Fernholm refers as "folk schools" in Sweden, where "bildung" or human development is central to the educational project.
Fernholm observes that 56% of youth feel that humans are doomed by climate change. Nate asks what tools might help assuage the effects of holding this view. Well, the Greeks invented a very effective cultural technology for the collective airing and consideration of the worst possible outcomes imaginable - they called it "tragedy." Tragic drama was incorporated into annual festivals attended by all, ensuring that everyone, young and old, understood that human hubris was constrained by limits - limits imposed by society and ethics, by nature and biology, by the gods and transcendent justice. The audience participated collectively in the emotional recognition called "catharsis" - an emotional recognition of the frailty and fallibility of the human condition. What new forms of collective catharsis are needed in the age of polycrisis? Nate, there's your topic for a future show.
I was especially touched by and appreciative of Erik's account of his burnout - and how he retreated to his garden. He further mentions how violent modern society has become, in its most trivial details and interactions - and makes an offhand remark about the slower pace of a conversation with a rural farmer. Is it possible that the natural pace of a rural life (and the pace of rural, agrarian thoughts and conversations) might in fact be the most comforting, most sane life of all? Where growing plants and tending for animals and keeping a wary eye on the weather and the seasons puts a person into deep contact with natural cycles? It's not an original thought - see Thoreau, see Wendell Berry. We cannot all be farmers, much less go back to being hunter gatherers - but all of the educational theorists mentioned above noted the importance of building, in primary education, an authentic connection to the natural world and the development and practice of some of the basic skills involved in agricuture and animal husbandry.
On the impact of phones and social media, I couldn't agree more: We have forsaken our kids, and let's be frank, our adult selves, to a form of slavery where our very thoughts are mined for private profit. "We gave you to Morloch" - indeed. But we also have the agency and power to end the hijacking, if only we care to. Legislating is commendable. But there is also a direct pathway: Reduce or eliminate altogether your phone and social media use. That choice is within everyone's power.
Finally - Erik, it's definitely about love. Taking it a little further: I feel that love is a facet of Life - the shared recognition and appreciation of the mystery of it all; the affirmation at the beating heart of being alive, improbably, in an infinite universe. This is an intra- and inter-species phenomenon: Love is the gravity that living organisms feel in each other's presence.
I'll be attending the IDG conference next week (virtually), so I am really looking forward to hearing more from Erik and his partners there. Thanks once again for this show, as it really opened some encouraging new pathways for me.
The cautionary tale of this approach to inner work is the bias toward reductionist, mind-centered understanding of reality as opposed to our heart-centered knowingness that exists at our genetic level which contains the accumulated data from our specie’s experience. Our bodies function well beyond our conscious understanding of our bodies. The balance that reveals who we are is found by acknowledging conscious understanding is for processing new experiential information and heart-knowledge is our depository of collective experiential information we receive from our parents via a fertilized egg.