We live in a strange time. We carry the entire world around with us in our pocket, our social media feeds flooding us every day with more perspectives than we know what to do with. Yet rather than this incredible interconnectivity helping us to expand our perspective, understand each other better, and bring people closer together, it seems to be having the opposite effect. Our minds have become more entrenched and polarized than ever, our culture more fractured and fragmented, and we seem to be burning more bridges between us than are being built.
As a result, conversations are breaking down. Empathy is breaking down. Our capacity to enfold with each other is breaking down. The spaces between us have become colonized by social media algorithms that exploit our cognitive biases and directly influence what we perceive, how we think, and how we view each other. And the results have been disastrous.
We see these corrosive effects just about everywhere we look — in our politics, in our media, and sometimes even here in our own integral community. Many think this state of affairs only has one outcome: increasing conflict, which some fear may even spiral into civil war.
But my guest today, Stephanie Lepp, is pointing us toward a different path — where all of this polarization and fragmentation represents an opportunity to rekindle our connections, to deepen and expand our meaning making, and to reinvent the lost art of conversation.
In her Faces of X media project, Stephanie is role modeling a different kind of discourse, one that is based on mutual respect, good faith, humility, and genuine curiosity in other perspectives — all of which have become such scarce resources in today’s attention age.
This incredibly well-produced video series is doing something truly extraordinary, and something that is deeply resonant with the integral heart — encouraging us to reach across the divide, and to open ourselves up to new points of view without compromising our own deeply held principles and dignities. There is an important aspect of “Growing Up” here, allowing us to take greater, deeper, more comprehensive perspectives that are more aligned with our developmental capacities.
And perhaps more importantly, Faces of X also invites us to some critical “Cleaning Up”, helping us to notice that all of the conflicts that we are seeing “out there” are really taking place “in here” — in our own minds, in our own consciousness, in our own relationships with each other — allowing us to re-integrate the disowned pieces of ourselves that are driving so many of these culture war conflicts. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy, and in our mental models of reality — and Faces of X can help show each of us what we might be missing.