Dialog.Builders Manifesto
Manifesto
Humanity is in an existential crisis; people are growing apart and are becoming more and more polarized or “divergent” as I name it. Whereas mankind meanwhile possesses all tools and technologies needed to realize a dignified life for all human beings, we instead increasingly face conflict, inequality, forced migration and (mankind induced) climate change. This indicates that we, as humanity, are failing and are using our capabilities wrongly.
Some of us are maximizing their individual growth and footprint at the cost of others, often without realizing it. They do this instead of respecting personal boundaries and achieving sustainable growth for all of us. How to change the above behavior is the topic of this manifesto and its background. People will need to grow more together if we want to succeed in addressing the problems that impact all of us.
My counter movement proposition is quite straightforward; we need to enter into dialog with strangers and learn to encounter the unknown more often in order to get closer to each other. This can, as such, be relatively easily stimulated by wearing a Dialog.Builders symbol/button/badge, which invites strangers to address someone wherever he or she encounters a participant. However, the target is not to just establish a non-committing, small-talk type of conversation, but to contribute to convergence.
(The artwork required to locally produce/order the Dialog.Builders button can be found here (commercial exploitation of the logo is not allowed). Please contact us at jcn@dialog.builders in case you need any assistance. To “join” the informal Dialog.Builders community, see: https://community.dialog.builders)
Wearing the initiative’s button represents an open invitation to others to establish contact and to start talking to the person wearing the Dialog.Builders button; establishing a “listening to each other” focused dialog. The approach is fully concentrated on learning from and about the other, clearly not on teaching one’s points of view or telling people to be right or wrong. The objective is to reflect on the faced and absorbed unknown. Its ultimate purpose is to internalize the encounter and make it one’s own by processing it. Nevertheless, normally, reciprocity will also be the result of a conversation and people will thus, additionally, automatically learn from and about each other’s views.
At first, the above idea seems pretty simple. However, listening to the unknown is actually very difficult and has to be learned. Further, what to learn strongly depends on one’s cultural context. There are fortunately many listening and reflection techniques available that can be learned. Which ones to select is beyond the scope of this manifesto. However, there is some guidance in the goals of the initiative being to meet the other with eight convergent attitudes: sameness, ferventness, mindfulness, kindness, virtuousness, clear-sightedness, meekness and tenderness.
The above manifesto itself is short. However, the theoretical background of these processes and of the initiative is more extensive and will now be elaborated upon into more detail.
Background: how did we stop listening to each other and ourselves? Root causes: media use
Whereas radio and television were, in the beginning, a catalyst for starting a conversation between people — everyone listening to or watching the same channel, absorbing the same content, broadcast media actually became the start for more individualization or belonging to smaller, more specialized, groups of interest. With more choice, less people watched or listened to the same program and people started to become more selective, this automatically affected their human discussions which also became narrower and more selective.
From a, meanwhile mostly commercial, broadcaster’s point of view, the question became how to profit-wise optimize their audience. Two aspects are important here. First, broadcasters tried to find a common denominator, meaning that the popularity of the program became key. However, it also meant that large audience content became shallower. Second, because of the rise of zapping behavior, broadcasters needed to optimize the direct impact of their content, making it overall faster and more pronounced in order to attract immediate attention at any point in time to be selected between the many alternatives. As an overall effect, the continuous, optimized, call for attention has led to a general increase of media based screen time versus face time.
The next step beyond radio and TV is social media. Zapping has meanwhile been replaced by swiping. Posts must now attract our immediate attention to be liked and shared, and are thus optimized to strongly distract us from our daily routine (they become our daily routine) and to keep us busy.
Furthermore, friends force us via social pressure to participate and share our lives, often resulting in showing the outside world an avatar of ourselves, someone we would maybe like to be, but who we in reality are not. Notwithstanding, this effectively increases our screen time at the cost of face time even further.
Due to the uninterrupted stream of messages we now receive, our attention span is also becoming shorter, meaning that messages must be very brief and striking to be read and that more complex or longer messages are skipped or ignored. The end-result of these developments is that people started to live in a private bubble; a virtual life which is continuously requiring their attention, without much time left to physically socialize or reflect.
The next, AI assisted, step seems to go even further. AI starts to prevent material it considers non-relevant from reaching us. If one now searches with Google or opens a PDF, AI offers a summary to the user. For many people, this summary likely will be enough in the dense and overloaded information world we are meanwhile living in, and will read no further. What we tend to forget is that it are often the more random, less directly related, less precise, search results, which bring us our creative ideas and solutions because they stimulate us to think out of the box.
Following the filtering of information, limiting our view, AI powered LLMs like ChatGPT are mimicking human communication in order to personally assist us. This indirectly reduces the need to seek true human dialog and reinforces the “acceptability” of one’s growing actual personal isolation.
For now, the main problem caused by the above trends is that adopting this new virtual lifestyle leads to a strong reduction of real world human exposure outside of one’s core social bubble. We less and less meet and communicate with strangers coincidentally. Nevertheless, randomly encountering people in daily life remains the main contact with the unknown and an essential source of food for thought. Without such exposure there is less empathy and understanding developed; there is less convergence built. Encountering strangers is not about having the same opinion or agreeing or disagreeing with them; it is all about listening to and understanding the other’s, often different, views and to reflect on them. Such reflection does not require agreement.
Background: how to counter divergence?
Dialog.Builders’ goal is to increase the convergence between people. This means primarily to open up to listening. Of course this will also lead to talking and reciprocal dialog but Dialog.Builders’ mission is not to convince others, there are no rights or wrongs, there is no authority; there are only different opinions.
Wearing the initiative’s symbol/button/badge represents an open invitation to others to establish contact and to start talking in order to establish the above type of a listening-focused dialog. Although mostly very different in its purpose, there are similarities with the logic of confessing to a priest, one can out oneself here. The initiative’s approach is fully concentrated on learning from and about the other, clearly not on teaching one’s points of view. Nevertheless, normally, reciprocity will be the end result, and people will also learn from each other’s opinions.
There is always a relationship between talking and listening. However, teaching very often increases the distance between people because some participants will possess more knowledge than others about a subject. This is something that can easily create a position of authority and make people feel superior, creating divergence. But, as such, knowledge inequality does not have to cause such an issue as long as there is fundamental equality instead of dominance between people. For Dialog.Builders, every human being is considered different but equally valuable. Unfortunately, this is far from obvious in today’s reality.
On the other, listening, side, learning from/about the other brings people closer and leads mostly to convergence. The main purpose of the Dialog.Builders initiative is not to try to reach agreement or consensus with each other but to improve one’s understanding of a possibly different point of view, increasing tolerance; this will ultimately create more unity.
There is a fine balance between talking and listening, between teaching and learning. The first two of the pairs are needed as the stimulus or impulse for human growth, development and expansion, whereas the second pair is also there to realize or discover one’s boundaries and to prevent people from crossing the line: “learning” to respect others and nature/our environment over or in relation to a limitless desire for human growth and human control.
The problem is that currently there is a structural divergent unbalance found and that humanity (growing towards death) urgently needs to undo this and rebalance itself by creating an increase in convergence. This is needed in order to address the issues we commonly or collectively face as humanity, such as conflict, climate change, inequality and forced migration. In our current largely individualistic world, there are, as we will see, five elements to address. For most people it will mean to focus less on their virtual avatar and be more authentic, but there are four more attitudes which determine our relationship with others and with the outside world. Dialog.Builders wants to promote the use of this convergent side of humanity more.
Which attitude is most relevant, depends actually on the cultural context one lives in. Explaining one’s cultural positioning is beyond the scope of this article. However, a detailed description of all detailed processes can be found in two previous publications: “The Parable of Religious Convergence, The Path of Non-Violent Resistance” and “About Dialog”.
As said before, the initiative’s goal is to create a movement that stimulates people to establish communication with others on the basis of convergent principles; adjusting the globally divergent, currently unbalanced and dominant, elements with their convergent counterparts this way. Over the years I intensively observed people “culturally communicating” with each other, and developed a personal theory about the ways they use to do so. The corresponding cultural elements of my communication theory and their connections or attitudes will therefore be discussed into more detail now.
Background: ten cultural elements; sixteen relationships between them
Regardless of whether a cultural element in itself is individual or collective in nature, there are always two perspectives to be found. One perspective looks at the relational aspects from the “collective environment” point of view downwards, and represents the society’s dynamics towards its participants (top-down). The other perspective looks from the individual towards their surroundings and represents the upward individual-driven input or attitude to such a society’s framework (bottom-up). To analyze dialog, the second perspective is more useful, it directly shows how an individual can communicatively contribute to a society. This means that, other than in most of my previous publications, this bottom-up view from the individual upward towards their surroundings is used here.
In total there are ten cultural elements and sixteen relationships found between them, half of these are divergent and will mostly be used as a comparison or contrast to understand the other — convergent — half better. The outcome is that only the following five — bottom-up — cultural elements are the most relevant to detail, being the ones considered contributing to convergence according to my models: Authenticity, Adhesion, Hospitality, Empowerment and Compassion. These five elements and the eight relationships between them (four rational, two emotional and two spiritual), or to say it differently, their connecting convergent attitudes, will be elaborated on.
-1- Rational dominance: Authenticity
In the context of relating from Individual Identity (II) to others in the Emotional or Spiritual domain, there are four rational balances between divergence [d] and convergence [c] found, being: -a- Otherness [d] versus Sameness [c], -b- Charity [d] versus Mindfulness [c], -c- Mastery [d] versus Virtuousness [c] and -d- Entitlement [d] versus Meekness [c] .
Looking at the four above rational processes, which all point away from individual identity towards emotional or spiritual cultural elements, we can observe that the ones which have conditions imposed on or attached to participants and differentiate between people on the basis of such criteria are the divergent ones. Related to becoming involved, one has to show candidacy to become part. There is an argument ongoing about who can participate and who cannot. People with an outward looking attitude are thus forced to show their eligibility by presenting themselves, talking, rationally expressing themselves to be in favor of the demands. Often “candidates” will have to adapt to fulfill the external criteria, losing their authenticity. This process leads to artificiality, separation and a growing apart, as I name it divergence.
At the other, inward oriented side, this is not the case; people are primarily listening and asking themselves what or how they can take part in or contribute to the society, exploring their authenticity. In principle, everyone capable can unconditionally participate in this case; this brings people closer to each other and makes them thus convergent. Each of the four processes will be described now.
-a- Otherness [d] versus Sameness [c]
The first process links the individual with a small core group of others (Emotional Identity, EI), a group which gives a feeling of belonging to its members; there is a world of insiders and one of outsiders created. It means to develop criteria for who can join and become a member; people who do not match these criteria or in a different way “express/show” otherness from the group are excluded, which is divergent. One often must adjust to the group identity and share a collective group conviction in order to join, trading one’s authenticity. The convergent alternative is to, in principle, allow everyone who identifies with the group to become its member and base the group on shared sameness. This means to let people indiscriminately participate and let them explore their level of true commonality instead of primarily focusing on the differences between them.
-b- Charity [d] versus Mindfulness [c]
The second process links the individual with the society as an overarching emotional entity (Emotional Unity, EU). Also, here two types of engagement can be found. One can see one’s engagement as an obligation and fulfill one’s duties or imposed expectations on the basis of who one considers oneself to be (expression). In practice, this means paying an obligatory contribution like taxes or a contribution to charity. However, it does not imply any deeper involvement beyond this. Exclusivity is preserved this way, and the outward looking charity approach mostly remains divergent by effectively separating the benefactor from the beneficiaries. The alternative, inward looking, approach is to listen and observe others and to ask oneself what one can contribute to the society as a whole. This mindfulness approach is convergent and brings people together.
-c- Mastery [d] versus Virtuousness [c]
The third process links the individual with governance (Spiritual Identity, SI). Entitlement to govern can be based on two principles in this case. The first one is formal education or other qualifications, in which people have to show their knowledge or potential influence in order to express their suitability to be in power. This mastery approach generates a classification and is thus divergent. The alternative, second, approach is based on people’s personal qualities or virtuousness; the most suitable people will govern, not based on individual power but on their capacity to listen to what is needed and prioritize the measures required. This is the convergent way.
-d- Entitlement [d] versus Meekness [c]
The last, fourth individual process links the individual with regard for others or the universe (Spiritual Unity, SU). In this situation, there is an argument about the entitlement to participate, which can easily lead to dispossession of rights or property by those expressing to be entitled to more at the cost of those proclaimed to take no part in the system. This outward looking “apartheid” approach is separating people into entitled and disentitled and is thus divergent. The convergent alternative is to observe or listen to, for example nature and to develop meekness toward forces beyond human control and to submit oneself to acceptance of the unknown instead of trying to control it, this is a first stage of what religion is about.
All four previously described personal balances are the start of a relationship between the individual and the outside world. These processes are dominantly rational. However, if one continues on the four (eight) paths opening up, one enters into the dominantly emotional or dominantly spiritual domain. It means that there are four (balanced) complements found, which are not rationally dominant but, which dominantly represent emotionality or spirituality. Their following order of use in practice depends on the culture one lives in. These, four, non-rational, cultural processes will be described now.
-2- Emotional dominance: Adhesion & Hospitality
-a- Allegiance [d] versus Ferventness [c]
Collectively, the members of a limited group (EI) have two choices: they can focus on “us” or they can focus on “them”. A focus on “them” leads to enforcement of strict allegiance or to an expectation of strong loyalty to the group. This way the group’s identity is protected (conditional approach). This often causes tension between those members closely following the core conviction of the group and those who are more loosely attached or further away in their identification and are thus at risk to be expelled and become outsiders. Since there mostly is animosity between insiders and outsiders of the group, the approach is divergent. The convergent alternative is to focus on “us” and to make the group adhesive, welcoming everyone who feels at home in the group and let them explore their level of commonality or ferventness in following the group’s collective ideals (unconditional approach).
-b- Submissiveness [d] versus Kindness [c]
The second example of a relationship between rationality and emotionality is based on the treatment of strangers or outliers in a collective society (EU). Peoples’ behavior is based on their participation or engagement rather than on individual independence. The polarization is found in whether the society is principally warm or cold towards outsiders.
From a personal communication perspective, there is either hospitality or exclusivity/reservedness encountered. The “exclusive” nationalistic outward looking polarity leads to an expectation of compliance or submissiveness of the other to the group’s principles (assimilation). This is a continuation of the charity approach which does not require real emotional involvement. Although people are more collectively involved at this stage, it is on the basis of a commonly or nationalistically sharing norms for being “proud of the society they are part of” and not on any sympathy for each other. This is mostly also expressed in their treatment of strangers as being unwelcome intruders instead of being welcome guests. Outliers are fenced-off from a patriotic environment. This is divergent behavior.
The alternative convergent polarity is to be hospitable and to treat strangers with kindness. Such society is open for change and absorption; it is based on what people have to collectively offer to others. There is convergent, solidarity-based behavior, to be found.
-3- Spiritual dominance: Empowerment & Compassion
-a- Dictatorship [d] versus Clear-Sightedness [c]
The first spiritual balance is about governance or having control over all people in the entire ecosystem (SI). It is the leadership that rules over the spiritual domain here. Such a spiritual arrangement can be based on empowerment, where everyone is positioned by voluntarily optimizing their fitting or matching capabilities to the entirety or, alternatively, it can be founded on a hierarchy, enforcing people how and where to fit in.
Enforcement means human control and to create a hierarchy of giving and taking autocratic orders in order to manage the entirety. Such a hierarchy is divergent in its character because it ranks people on the basis of formal appearances rather than their capabilities. At its top-end one finds an autocratic dictator ruling over all.
At the other side of the spectrum one finds empowerment: here people contribute to the entirety on the basis of their capabilities and are empowered to do so by the leadership. This type of leadership is based on clear-sightedness, wisdom and mentorship. The “primus inter pares” type leader does in this case not control people but instead stimulates or enables them to maximally contribute to the ecosystem; people are looking inward and behave convergently.
-b- Dehumanization [d] versus Tenderness [c]
The second and last spiritual balance is about the footprint of people as part of the entire ecosystem or universe (SU). It is about controlling the human impact and to address the eventual disharmony of negatively being out of balance by reducing this human footprint. The first, convergent, way is to look inward and to, through the development of (spiritual) compassion with all others, learning to realize that death is inevitable if it comes, and to learn to accept this. The second way is an outward looking divergent one, it enforces full subservience to the system and makes people silent from reacting at (human) measures or on (human) events which kill “other” people and actually could kill them in the end as well.
The above is not about the leadership guiding this process here (like in the first spiritual balance), but about the way mankind as a collective of individuals does not oppose it. This, subservience-based, process leads to human controlled spirituality, where humans decide (or allow their leaders to decide) how to reduce the human footprint by defining who gets the space and thus by destroying or killing all others who are no longer considered to be human, but vermin to be killed.
People dehumanize part of the population as being disentitled to occupy space and live in that space. The process starts with dispossession and ends with genocide and is clearly divergent. After Nazism, with its “Untermensch” classification, it is what is currently happening in Gaza. The treatment of the Palestinians in Gaza is a clear example of this process. All Gazans are considered to be the vermin of Hamas, including babies, and can be killed without giving it any second thought.
The alternative to reduce the footprint is to look inward and to, out of compassion, share the surplus one may have with all others in order to reduce the total space mankind occupies and thus to maximize the space for the entire population. This spiritual tenderness approach is clearly convergent.
To do: start wearing the Dialog.Builders symbol and behave more convergently!
Dialog.Builders is about escaping one’s virtual bubble with its related screen time, and to generate more face-time plus time for, inward looking, reflection. Starting point is to put one’s mobile phone away whilst travelling or when one is in other public spaces with people around. This allows strangers (or even friends or acquaintances these days) to initiate a face-to-face conversation by reaching out to the ones wearing a Dialog.Builders button. Wearing the badge symbolizes openness to get into dialog. (Also at home dialog is important but this subject is beyond the scope here). If no-one is around or no-one seeks connection, one should start reflecting rather than becoming hooked to the distraction of portable media again. In my opinion, people should clearly start to organize their balance between screen-time, face-time, and reflection.
The first step is to connect; the badge or button possibly being a catalyst. The next step is how to channel one’s thoughts and let them become proper input of the inwardly directed reflection processes in order to learn about the other, the unknown and about oneself. The target is not to immediately answer the questions or to react to the feelings one may have or that may be raised. The focus is primarily on listening and showing understanding, much less on someone’s own existing position. The goal is to absorb the raised questions, feelings and “awareness of existence” and process them until, for example via contemplation, an attitude out of one’s authenticity appears. At that moment, a person gains clarity about where they stand and becomes generally able to respond more meaningfully. Their perspective now arises from a place of inner coherence and authenticity. The result of contemplating is not any concrete answer, but dissolving the question itself.
There are five reflection processes to be found here; associated with the five elements. Related to authenticity there is contemplation, related to adhesion there is “emphatization”, related to hospitality there is “sympathization”, related to empowerment there is “empowerization” or ”entrustment”, and finally related to compassion there is meditation or prayer. To discuss them in detail is unfortunately beyond the limits of this article. However, the eight convergent attitudes are the outcome of these five reflection techniques.
The manifesto tries to generate a basic framework to process the encountered “food for reflection”. It tries to stimulate some attitudes whereas it tries to diminish others. However, every individual will have to independently explore what he or she relates to.
If humanity wants to grow together, it means to start avoiding the eight divergent attitudes and to stimulate using their complementing opposite convergent counterparts instead.
Conclusion
The world is rapidly falling apart. Institutions like the UN and its related international courts have the world’s mandate to prevent this. Unfortunately, this structure is currently failing on humanity because its members are becoming increasingly polarized and structurally disagree on the necessary measures to be taken. The UN therefore needs urgent modernization to fulfill our mandate again to safeguard peace and to contribute to issues like reducing forced migration, climate change and inequality, which impact all of us.
Besides this top-down approach, there is another vision, one of a bottom-up contribution of all individuals towards a better understanding of each other. Sadly, the opposite personal development is going on. Individuals are getting more and more isolated by the virtual media bubble they create and live in. There is less and less communication or contact with the unknown outside of their bubble.
This manifesto proposes a solution here. It targets to create a dialog between strangers and their related unknown by creating an opportunity to connect. Practically, it is simple — if those willing to allow connection start wearing a visible Dialog.Builders symbol/badge/button they cast an open invitation to talk to them. The goal is to improve the understanding of each other and to become more tolerant for differences by exchanging experiences.
However, such a result is not automatically achieved and needs guidance. First, the focus of the initiated dialog must be on listening to and learning from each other, rather than on talking or teaching the other one’s “right” opinion. Second, the impulses received as food for thought from the outside world, must be processed properly and internalized. The targeted result must not be a change of opinion about the single individual one has met, but a change in attitude. This is done by reflection on experiences by contemplation, “empathization”, “symphatization”, “empowerization” or meditation.
Finally, Dialog.Builders offers a theoretical model framework to achieve these convergent results above. It proposes to replace:
-otherness by sameness
-allegiance by ferventness
-charity by mindfulness
-submissiveness by kindness
-mastery by virtuousness
-dictatorship by clear-sightedness
-(dis)entitlement by meekness
-dehumanization by tenderness
Internalizing these eight target processes will lead to a bottom-up growing together, correcting the current dominantly divergent tendency and form a counter movement. Hopefully, it will make the world a better place to live for all of us.
