I am feverishly reading the work of Howard Bloom in preparation for meeting him. His overview of the development of group consciousness (Global Brain, Wiley, 2000) mirrors my own thinking, but carries it deeper and with more supporting evidence. His ideas on the elements of a ‘collective learning machine’ (an epithet that applies to each of us as cell aggregates, to KMI / Kinesis, and to the bodywork / movement profession in general) are particularly relevant to understand our process and advance it. Where are you in this spectrum? (Hint: you can inhabit several places within it in different endeavors, but you cannot be nowhere.)
In every collective learning machine – and I paraphrase Bloom for the rest of this – there are five active elements, more or less in order, but all interacting in a developed system at all times: All of these elements have constructive and destructive phases or uses; read of them without judgment, but notice your affinity.
1) Conformity enforcers impose identity through similarities. These similarities help the group through adverse circumstances, develop a common language, and help the crowd pull together on collective enterprises. The induction process of the KMI training performs this task for us as a group – giving us a common presumptions, approach, language for bodyreading and strategy, the 12-series, and the common goals of length, alignment and a complete body image. Anatomy Trains (and our new effort of ‘Fascial Fitness’) seeks to diffuse a common language to speed the process of collective learning among the larger enterprise of physical education or, as I call it, Spatial Medicine.
In spite of the power it generates, of course, too much cookie-cutter similarity will be the death of any learning machine, so evolution builds in:
2) Diversity generators give birth to variation. Each individual represents an hypothesis in the communal mind. Many of the diversity generators are useless or even potentially harmful, but when circumstances change, some few of these folks hold the key to successful adaptation to the future. In your immune system, many white blood cells harbor antigens which are useless (and therefore kept under control) until a specific invader germ enters the body. Suddenly, these previously useless WBC’s are vital to the body’s survival. The ‘odd ducks’ within a group can be annoying or even detrimental in ‘good’ times, but some few can hold the key to new opportunities in one kind of adversity or another.
The diversity generators are allocated resources by the:
3) Inner judges continually take the measure of results, rewarding contributions of value, and punishing bad guesswork. If we’ve solved a knotty problem, we hear the cheers of fellow workers or family members, and our systems flood us with positive hormones that swell our chests, give us energy, and set our minds ablaze with confidence. If we cannot get a grip or cannot find agreement in what we are offering, our inner judges activate self-destruct machinery (stress hormones) that literally kill off brain cells and dull our wits, steal our pep, and isolate us. Inner judges are sometimes generous but often far from kind. But whatever their action on the individual, they are essential to complex adaptive learning systems.
The inner judges decisions activate the:
4) Resource shifters shunt riches and influence to group members who succeed (in whatever terms success is measured). The resource shifters embody Jesus’ algorithm: To he who hath shall be given, from he who hath not, even what he has shall be taken from him. Again, not very kind or ‘just’, perhaps, but it is the law of the group in learning.
Resource rich groups then engage in:
5) Intergroup tournaments or face offs evoke cooperative effort and innovation from each collective intelligence in an effort to survive and thrive. The mechanism here is familiar from Darwin’s natural selection, but applies in this context to group interactions or ‘wars’. This can range from a friendly dispute over technique to the competition among schools to the competition among methods to nuclear confrontation, but these are the forces – mostly unseen at the level of ‘culture’ that make mass minds click.
Obviously this has implications from family therapy right up through realpolitik on a global level, but let’s stick to the nested group of the individual practitioner, the KMI school, and the collective SI endeavour currently embodied in the IASI.
The KMI training is designed to produce (in an ever-improving recursive iterations) a conformity enforcement of practical fascial pattern-altering skills within a conceptual framework of the 3- and 12-series, but allowing enough room in our admissions policies and methods for ‘odd ducks’ who make us shake our heads and roll our eyes right now, but may at some future date innovate something of real value to the ever-changing situation of the marketplace. Thus our teachers are conformity generators with an eye (and an allowance) for the diversity generators. Once graduated, the group’s inner judges (not individual people, but collective ideas and feelings) will promote some to successful practitioners; others fall by the wayside and seek elsewhere.
Some successful practitioners will become teachers, and material and non-material resources will be ‘paid’ to those who correctly read and fulfill a need in the marketplace of ideas and techniques. These teachers / clinic heads / writers / presenters / volunteers et al. are building and will continue to create the identity of KMI / Kinesis within the SI community and beyond. This identity competes in an intergroup tournament going on among the schools within IASI for the resources of the small group of those interested in structural integration. But there is a larger intergroup tournament among the various bodywork methods for dominion over the larger marketplace of hands-on healing. So even though we compete within IASI for the ‘resource’ of students for practitioning, we band together in IASI to form a group for competing / cooperating with groups outside SI to enlarge the group of potential practitioners (and clients) interested in SI. These intergroup tournaments will improve the outcome of the new physical education and therapy on offer in the 21st century, paving the way for the movement component of health care, if and when we should ever collectively decide to trade in ‘sick care’ for true health care. Ultimately, we are part of the larger intergroup tournament with the medical system monopoly and the old ideas entrenched within it.
Our social health and (I believe) continued existence on the planet requires dismantling and successfully rebuilding our system of caring for and educating our Neolithic children in the human-constructed environment of the Electronic Age. We at Kinesis are an actively conscious part of that process. Conformity enforcement, diversity generation, inner judgment, resource shifting, and intergroup competition may not sound so attractive, and can sometimes be bloody in tooth and claw like Nature herself (it is Nature herself), but it is all part of improving our collective learning in the service of the human experiment.
