Metanoia: How Worldviews Change

Today's episode features Joan Trygg, a  member of the World Tree Center (https://www.theworldtreecenter.com/). We discuss her journey from being a lover of books and insight to being influenced by her Marxist son and coming to terms with the ecological crisis. Other topics include homeschooling, racism, the church, and spiritual "awakening". 

Little remains to be said about the ecological crisis except that our perceptions of it vary radically. Metanoia, which means "a transformative change of heart," examines why most people are so utterly unresponsive to witnessing the world die, while a few of us are deeply burdened. Abandoning Enlightenment notions of undifferentiated rationality, Tanner Millen and Arnold Schroder of Fight Like An Animal introduce their search for the embodied, experiential variables which shape people's paths to a state of meaningful ecological responsiveness.  We describe how in this first phase we are attempting to collect as broad a range of narratives of various paths to this state as possible, and how as our work progresses we hope to develop testable hypotheses and ultimately experiment with deploying processes of perceptual transformation. In this regard, we intend to pick up where the current state of the literature in fields like political psychology, cognitive science, trauma healing, and others leaves off.  In this episode, Tanner describes his unique path: how the lack of meaningful inquiry into possible human societies in academia disillusioned him; how childhood trauma and the exigencies of survival led him to disengage from broader realities and concern himself with accumulating income via competitive poker; how winning a fortune provided the sense of safety necessary for him to begin exploring his perceptions of reality; how remembering his sexual abuse allowed him to come to terms with other unbearable truths. A video version of this episode is also available.