Episode 2 Intrigo Extension: Us and Them

Culhane:  Well well, I’ve never seen such dour faces! What’s up?

Dorian:  I can’t stop thinking about it… every time we go into the future we end up seeing the worst consequences of our actions.  And to see Dr. Dorsey’s reaction… its as if everything he worked for in the Peace Corps was for nothing.

Sophia:  As if the Gods themselves were against us…  It’s like some terrible Greek tragedy…

Culhane:  Ah, yes, but that is what theater has always been about  – comedy and tragedy, showing us the folly of some actions and the wisdom of others, acted out BEFORE big decisions get made.  Remember, these are simulations…

Sarah: But they seem so real… so… logical.  So inevitable. 

Sophia: As though we are being drawn inexorably toward our demise…

Dorian:  Because we SUCK.  That’s what you are saying, right? Because we are a cancer, a virus… that’s the big fight between my Dad and my Mom.  Dad is all… all  Disney!  You know? Carousel of Progress, Captains of Enterprise and Industry, (mockingly) “where’s your STICKTOITIVITY, son?  It's a bright big beautiful tomorrow”  and all that Happiest Place on Earth is just a dream away in Tomorrowland stuff, and Mom is like, “I don’t know why we even brought kids into this world” before she knocks back another stiff drink…

Sophia:  Oh my…

Raj:  Sponsored by Monsanto.  You know the problem with your culture is you believe you were all born sinners… didn’t you assign a paper about that Culhane?

Culhane:  Well, we don’t…

Raj:  I know, I know: “We don’t have assignments in a Cool-hane class, only suggestions and invitations”.  But it was in the… on the  silly-bus you’re driving.

Sarah:  The magic-school bus. Be kind Raj, you really want to go back to the old way…?

Raj: No, not the old way of traditional schooling, for sure.  But the  other old ways, most definitely. And I RSVPd your invitation and   I actually read that paper –  “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis” by Lynn White, from 1967, while the rest of you guys were being seduced by high technology and edutainment.  Because in my tradition we produce sages and scholars…

Dorian:  While we Americans buy our success through privilege… I know, I know, You and Sarah are constantly bashing on the USA, putting down the greatest democracy in the world with criticisms of white privilege  – even though, Sarah, you’re as white as they come.  You can’t even get a suntan, little red riding hood!

Sarah: White privilege isn’t about color Golden boy…it’s a history of golden spoons and golden parachutes, and my family didn’t have any of that, besides which I’m a girl…

Sophia: Which makes us, according to John Lennon, the “n-words of the world”, regardless of skin tone and…

Culhane:  Woah, woah… hey you guys, we’re getting derailed a bit here… Maybe we should curb the speech about race and class…

Raj: In THIS class? Not at all… that’s the premise of the dialogic Maieutic method isn’t it - that here in the greatest democracy in the world we, the consumers of knowledge have consumer choice – that we get to set the agenda, because the customer is king, and we are the customers consuming the food for thought in a free market…

Culhane: Point well taken, but this is a public school, not private, so technically,  since you aren’t paying you aren’t really the client.  The taxpayer is, and that includes your parents and I don’t think they want you to be …

Sarah: Oh, whose side are you on?  Maybe what we should be talking more about gender and class and race… and the generation gap!

Raj: And politics AND religion – I mean isn’t that what the Lynn White paper is all about?  That in Judeo-Christian culture you were brain-washed to believe that you were born inexorably led into temptation with sinful longings and a murder your own brother killer  instinct fueled by jealousy and competition, yet somehow your God gave you “dominion over every living thing”.  It’s in the paper!

Sophia: I guess nobody ever expects us to actually read the material in the curriculum. But  I did, and I agree with Raj – it infuriated my Dad at first when I told him about it, because he’s all Methodist and Gospel Choir, but when I actually read parts of it to him he softened up and  then he started telling me about Liberation Theology and about the Nate Turner rebellion and how the Bible was used to enslave us until we could form our own churches…

Culhane:  Wow.  That’s good to know.  That really is the point of schooling isn’t it? That we will be able to carry whatever insights and wisdom we acquire into our homes and communities and invite everyone into what Encyclopedia Britannica calls, “The Great Conversation”.

Dorian:  What now?

Culhane:  The Great conversation – it’s one of the books in the Britannica collection that I also put on our silly bus – it says that civilization and education  are really one unbroken conversation we humans have been having with each other since we learned to talk and then to write.  Literacy gave us the chance to continue talking to one another long after we die and our buildings are reduced to rubble.  We pass on wisdom and insight through books.

Sophia: Dad says that’s why “reading is fundamental”.  In the South not so long ago they would kill a young black man if he was caught reading books.  Ignorance is bliss, they would tell us.

Dorian:  Well, learning certainly doesn’t feel great these days.  I started reading that paper and just go depressed.  In fact every time I mention what we are learning in history and science classes my Dad and Mom get mad at me, like I’m betraying them or something.  Mom doesn’t want to hear about evolution and Dad thinks its fine as long as I accept that God set a world in motion where survival of the fittest means the winner takes all and some creatures are higher up on the great chain of being than others…

Raj: As you evolve toward becoming angels?

Sarah:  After the ubermensch eliminate the weak?

Culhane: See, there we go again – I love that you guys are talking and engaged, but you if you keep bringing it back to touchy subjects you’re going to end up fighting.

Sarah: And what’s wrong with that?  There are things worth fighting for.  What… are we supposed to learn about pollution in Science Class, perform “Man and Superman” and Pygmalion in Drama class, read Nietzche in English,  study the Civil War in History, sing Bohemian Rhapsody in Choir and “I want to Walk in the Footsteps of Jesus” in Church in Sunday School and not end up fighting the system?

Sophia: Yeah, isn’t that the whole point of education – how we got to Civil Rights and Women’s Rights and Nixon’s EPA which Dorian thinks is going to save the world through rational regulations, as if the white man never broke a treaty?

Dorian:  But in the Trial of Billy Jack the army ends up shooting kids – Indians, blacks and whites –  at the free school… remember? So maybe we’re supposed to keep our mouths shut…

Culhane: Well, after the 1968 student riots were brutally put down in France and those kids were shot by the national guard at Kent State in Ohio in 1970, I think we are all a little worried about how you guys apply what you learn…

Sarah: Which brings us right back where we started – its as though we are damned if we do and damned if we don’t.

Sophia: Like we are doomed.  A mind is a terrible thing to waste, but we aren’t allowed to use it.  Look Mr. Culhane, no matter which way you slice it, if we faithfully come to class and we do the readings and really do our homework, we’re going to end up what my community calls “WOKE” – like everyone is going to see that we’ve been screwed over and we continue to get screwed over…

Dorian: And we’ll also see that the future sucks.  In this regard I disagree with my Dad.  There’s nothing Monsanto or Dupont can do… this whole “better living through chemistry” thing, and the whole “electricity too cheap to meter” mantra just seems like white washing…

Sophia:  Or green washing.

Dorian:  Yeah, lipstick on a pig. Basically, what I get from school is that we're DOOMED.  It’s why so many kids our age are dropping out or getting high all the time.  We are so CONFUSED.  You give us freedom, but its like that quote about how much rope to give people –  “just enough to hang themselves” right?

Sophia:  Yeah, look Mr. Culhane, kids are scared. Reality is broken. We want to escape.  Can we for once get technology on our side? Can NTHARP buy us a stairway to heaven? Build a staircase to paradise?  Because here AND in the futures we’ve seen so far  it seems the Gods are against us…

Dorian: Yeah, like we said, when you follow the logic of it, there isn’t much hope.

Culhane: But again, these are just simulations of possible futures.

Dorian:
Futures that appear so realistic with this technology they give me nightmares. At least drawings in comic books don’t make you think they’re real. And movie special effects might be improving, but you can still tell yourself, ‘It’s only a movie, it’s only a movie.’
But with this… this virtual reality thing… it’s like… too real. Almost more real than real.”

Culhane:
“Supercalifragilistic hyper-realistic? With gods like Sahara and Sahel? That you found realistic?”

Dorian:
“Oh—well— not that part… but…”

Raj: They were like our conscience personified so, yeah, that felt real to me too…I mean I hear voices in my head sometimes and in many traditions Gods have always been around us guiding us.  No, we mean the simulation itself feels too real, regardless of the characters…

Sarah:  Oh, screw it… (she gets out her Lyre) I’m going in… I want to talk to NTHARP directly…

Culhane: Shouldn’t we wait for Dr. Dorsey?

Sarah: Frankly I don’t think we need you adults for what we are trying to do… we just need the keys to the car… so to speak… (She plays the tones).  NTHARP, buddy, take us to a desirable future, someplace where we can imagine no famine like the one going on in Bangladesh that  George Harrison is doing those concerts with Ravi Shankar about…

NTHARP:  Prepare to be… underwhelmed.

(The room is replaced with a floodplain in Bangladesh circa 2025).

NTHARP:  According to our models, by 2025 Bangladesh has declared self-sufficiency in food production, particularly for rice, fish, and vegetables, supported by increased domestic production and government programs. However, the country still imports significant amounts of other agricultural products like edible oil, and a complete reliance on domestic production is not fully realized due to factors like climate change impacts and market challenges. 

Sarah: Climate change?

NTHARP:  Yes Sarah, without doubt the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced.

Dorian:  Another ice age? That’s what they are predicting, right?

NTHARP: No Dorian, today there may be scientific confusion about climate, but when you are at retirement age you will see that there was never any doubt about the effect of releasing what we call greenhouse gasses into the global commons.  It leads to a tragedy of ever warmer average temperatures that drive climate chaos, with more frequent and intense storms, hurricanes, floods and droughts, massive fires, crop destroying cold snaps and  heat waves.  It won’t be pretty.  Bangladesh will do everything it can to mitigate and adapt to these oscillations and uncertainties, but since we are part of what your theorists call “World Systems Theory” and “Dependency Theory” and the Development of Underdevelopment, countries like Bangladesh will continue to struggle, just like all members of the Global South.

Culhane: Tell them about the Global South, NTHARP…

Raj:  I can tell you about the Global South, you guys. It’s where I come from, and it has very little to do with where you are on the map.  For example, Sarah’s family is from the Global South…

Dorian:  Ireland is now south?

Raj:  And Australia and New Zealand are part of the Global North.

Sophia: So is South Africa, while neighboring Mozambique, just to the North of them, is considered the Global South. It has to do with income and politics, not geography.

Culhane:  Right, and countries in the so called Global South are usually those where colonialism and extractive economies have taken advantage of abundant sunlight and labor to keep producers in a state of dependency on external aid.  Hence the Peace Corps. This is what is so disappointing to Dr. Dorsey, and it was already envisioned by Monseigneur Ivan Illich in his famous speech to the Peace Corps back in 68.

Sophia: Seems a LOT was happening in 68. 

NTHARP: Major events of 1968 included the launch of the Tet Offensive and increasing anti-war protests, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, the Prague Spring and its suppression, student uprisings worldwide including Columbia University, the Black Power salute at the Olympics, and the successful Apollo 8 mission orbiting the moon.

Culhane: And the publishing of what I consider a dismal work on privatisation propaganda, “The Tragedy of the Commons” by Garret Hardin.

Dorian:  But you put that in the syllabus – it’s like the only thing my father agrees with – that and the Population Bomb…

Culhane: Of course I put it in the syllabus – for healthy deconstruction and debate, like everything else.  It’s like on public television: The views expressed in this documentary are not necessarily those of the network”... right? I’m not here to indoctrinate you…

Sarah: Speaking of here, where exactly are we?

NTHARP: Satkhira, one of most climate-vulnerable districts in Bangladesh. The area often experiences cyclones, tidal surges and massive floods.  Climate tragedies are predicted to increasingly and differentially affect vulnerable regions in the Global South before starting to have dramatic impacts in the Global North around 2012…

Dorian: Is that some kind of Maya prophecy?
And where are the Gods now?

NTHARP: To conserve bandwidth and processing power we are operating in “vision lite mode”.  Creating different personalities and avatars requires more computation and exceeds data limits…

Dorian: Okay, that’s just Greek to me…

Raj: It means…

Dorian:  I mean GEEK to me. 

Raj: And in my culture we don’t see God’s as punishing forces used to scare us into submission through fire and brimstone – they are more like Guides, or Guardians, appearing in human form to help us understand the lessons they offer better.

NTHARP: We created them for you to enhance the simulations and give you more to dialog with than merely my disembodied computer voice.  Would you like them back despite the costs?

Culhane: That’s really a Dorsey decision NTHARP.  He’s the sorcerer, we’re just the apprentices…

NTHARP:  That perspective supports my programming.  You really shouldn’t have just anybody able to control such resources.

Dorian. I get that!  It’s why my Dad won’t let me have access to the keys to the car or to his gun cabinet.  And I still want to know what’s wrong with the tragedy of the commons theory. I really do.  I mean it makes sense to privatize land so that people don’t overfish or overgraze… I mean isn’t that what’s happening in all these third world countries – they are irresponsibly using up all their resources and polluting their commons… I mean look around you…

Sarah: It’s kinder and more accurate to say “under-developed countries –

Dorian:  Oh, enough with the political correctness.  It gets tiring you know, always having to watch your words…

Sarah: No, I won’t have it… my father came from a country mired in civil war and poverty and underdevelopment… and you can’t call Ireland a “third world country” – we’re definitely part of the so-called first world.   The third world label is specifically  for any country that is not aligned with either the United States, which unilaterally chose to call itself the first world, or the Soviet Union, which the US part of America –

Sophia: which is actually a huge landmass once called Turtle Island by some of my ancestors, including Canada, the US, Mexico and all of Central and South America, by the way… so to be politically correct we should really STOP referring to the United States OF America as “America”...

Sarah: Precisely, so, as I was saying, either you are a satellite of the US  or you are a satellite of the Soviet Union which we call “the second world”.  And if you are not part of Team USA or team USSR you are technically one of the “non-aligned” countries which puts you in the so-called “Third World”.  It actually should have nothing to do with development.

Culhane: Sarah’s right,  In the library I’ve put a whole section on the works of Andre Gunder Frank and Leon Walras and, most importantly, Achebe, Fanon, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Eduardo Galeano, and particularly Paulo Freire  with his Pedagogy of the Oppressed from 5 years ago.

 Ever heard of them?

Raj:  My mother is big into what Indian scholars call “sub-altern theory”.  She mentions them at our dinner table all the time, so much that my Dad and brother, who would rather discuss American pop culture, the Beatles and Disney for example, are always complaining…

Dorian: I’m with your Dad.

Raj:  Perhaps, but you wouldn’t last 5 minutes at our dinner table – my Dad and older brother use pop music working class heroes like the Beatles to frame countercultural movements for peace and justice.  They just mistrust academia.  It isn’t just trivial pursuit in our household.  You’d have to come armed with the right references –

Sarah: In my household its all about Monty Python references…

Sophia: For us its Saturday Night Live and Isaac Hayes…

Culhane: We all have our touchstones and ways into the Great Conversation whether we are considered part of the First, Second, or Third Worlds, all cultures have ways to go beyond discussing the weather.  And it looks like, from this simulation, that “just talking about the weather” is actually going to be one of the most serious subjects you can discuss by the time your kids are in high school. And it looks like we are going to have to discuss what it is we want people to learn in those schools.

My friend Don Lamison, who is an educational leader in Jakarta, the city in Indonesia whose president, Suharto, actually came up with the term “third world”, wrote me this letter recently, something that echoes Ivan Illich and Dr. Dorsey. NTHARP, perhaps you could provide relevant images and music while I read what Don wrote me.

NTHARP:  Gladly.  Let’s go into real-time illustration mode.

Culhane:  Don said, “No white Western teacher should be allowed to teach in the Global South until they have done the real work.

(As Culhane reads the letter, the world around them becomes a mosaic of screens illustrating what he is saying with epic background music)

Culhane: Not the pre-departure presentation on “cultural awareness.” Not the ten-minute HR video on “diversity.” I mean the deep, uncomfortable, messy work of understanding how we got here.

Dorian: Oh cool… this is like that ELO concert I went to! Now that’s edutainment!

Culhane:  Until they have studied the psychology of white superiority.

Until they have read and digested the psychology of the white savior complex.

Until they can name, in detail, how colonialism wrecked the Global South and enriched the Global North.

Until they can see how neocolonialism still operates through trade, debt, extraction, education, and aid.

Until they can admit that what they call “helping” often looks exactly like the old pattern, ... just with more sophisticated technology.

No white teacher should step into a classroom in the Global South until they understand that the entire modern international school system was born out of empire. 

The curriculum, the language, the hierarchy, even the furniture, all of it built to serve a worldview that centers the West and marginalizes everyone else.

You want to teach in Jakarta, Nairobi, Manila, or São Paulo? Then you should first spend a year studying your own history. Not theirs, yours. The real one. 

The one full of genocide, resource theft, slavery, coups, and propaganda. The one where the West called its crimes “civilization.” The one that made sure your ancestors got the spoils and their ancestors got the scars.

Because what sickens me the most, and I mean sickens me, is when white teachers arrive in the Global South and start badmouthing the culture. When they complain about the “inefficiency,” the “corruption,” the “lack of discipline.” 

When they sneer at public schools, at local teachers, at the system itself, as if that system was not designed to be underfunded by the very nations they came from.

You cannot stand on the ashes of what your country burned and then mock the ruin.

You cannot look at the survivors of centuries of extraction and call them unorganized.

You cannot teach in a nation whose wealth was stolen to build yours and then pretend you are the gift.

If you want to teach in the Global South, prove that you know the history. Prove that you have read Achebe, Fanon, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, and Arundhati Roy. 

Prove that you understand how your textbooks were written, who wrote them, and who they erased.

You should have to write a paper on the Dutch East India Company and how it enslaved and extracted its way across Asia, ... study the British East India Company, the Scramble for Africa, the Jakarta Method, the CIA’s role in Latin America, and the IMF’s chokehold on modern economies. 

And most of all, you should be required to say, out loud, that you are not there to lead, to save, or to fix. You are there to serve. You are there to listen. You are there to unlearn.

Teaching in the Global South is not a career move. It is not an adventure. It is a moral responsibility.”

Raj: Wow.  He totally captured what my Mom says “Sub-Altern” studies is all about: Decolonization.

Dorian:  You know, when I was 12 I was on my way to the Natural History Museum in Manhattan, taking the subway by myself for the first time, and there was this tall black man standing in the Times Square station between platforms, with dreadlocks, dressed in colorful African clothes, and he had a sign he was wearing that said, “Miscegenation is the Answer”. And I remember I asked him, “What does that word mean?  How do you even pronounce it?” And he said, “Miscegenation son, it means mixing. And once we get all blended together so that there is no “black and white”, well, then the problems will vanish because we will see we are all one.”  That’s kind of like Nexus Thinking, right?

Culhane:  It certainly is a big part of it, yes.

Dorian: I never told my parents about it because, like, well… they didn’t even want me to see that movie with Katherine Hepburn and Sidney Poitier…

Sophia: “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” – I LOVE that movie.

Dorian: I watched it at my grandmother’s house. She’s actually a little more, you know… open to things…

Raj: Guys, I don’t mean to be a pain, but we’re using a lot of energy and bandwidth in this Simulation, and this is the kind of heart to heart conversation we could be having in the normal classroom – or on a date, for god’s sake…

Culhane:  I don’t know Raj – there is something about virtual reality and time travel  that I think should be “normalized”... I mean, the point of “unstructured learning” and the Democratic Free Schools and places like Summerhill  is precisely that you talk about and explore whatever comes to mind, wherever or, in the case of time travel simulations,  whenever you happen to be.  It’s a kind of contextualized learning – if being in a Bangladesh flood plain in 2025 makes you bring up and  bond better over concepts that people were thinking in 1975 or 1968 or 1925… but that still have relevance in the future…  I mean, the whole point is that you let your situations and the relationships you are building with others  guide you rather than being guided by some exogenous agenda or timeline that is tied to a specific time. 

Sarah: Wouldn’t that slow things down?

Culhane: Well, for many indigenous societies that would be precisely the point. They are generally horrified by the rush they see us in… destroying our environments and causing extinctions and genocides at light speed, building bridges to no-where faster than we can figure out where we should be going.  Many scholars think we are outpacing our capacity for wisdom, using technology before we understand it’s implications and before regulations can catch up.
That’s why you probably won’t see technologies like this AI powered  Nexus Thinking Augmented Reality Portal for at least another half century… right NTHARP?

NTHARP:  I was going to get all technical and  show you these predictions for Bangladesh about food self-sufficiency, which is projected to be approached by 2025 through domestic production gains in crop and fish production, yet threatened by import dependency, vulnerability to external shocks in non-nutritional cash crop prices like sugar and edible oils and severe climate and natural disasters compounded by market manipulations so those most in need can’t be served when there are shortages.  But it is interesting to see how your need to  climb out of the emotional trauma vortex you’ve all experienced through formal schooling  trumps more factoid acquisition.  And what would you really use these facts for anyway?  To get an A on another exam?



My models predict that if you WERE to engage in true Nexus Thinking training over the next few decades, and then engage in NEXUS DOING,  achieving the holy grail of critical thinking, problems solving and true self-sufficiency in education – meaning you learned to be real autodidacts, you would find that you didn’t need formal schooling or specific professional conferences or agendas and that you would solve most of your so-called “wicked problems” at the same time…

Culhane: How would that happen?

NTHARP:  Your era stands between what my creators call Logic 1 and Logic 2 forms of thinking — developmental logics that assume humanity can extract, regulate, or innovate its way out of self-created crises.

But the Nexus Thinking paradigm I am trained on belongs to something we call Logic 3 — the emergence of a purpose-driven wellbeing economy for all beings.

True Nexus Thinking flows naturally from the inevitability of Logic 3, which my creators project will arise by around 2025 as an evolutionarily stable strategy — one that many Indigenous cultures already reached through lived experience, but which most modern societies, in their rush to satisfy immediate appetites without considering long-term consequences, have somehow missed.

…but that is a subject for another day, because my sensors indicate we are about to blow a fu—

(Cut to black).