Nexus Thinking Relational Summary Lecture 2: The Best and the Brightest
Nexus Thinking Relational Summary Lecture 2: The “Best and the Brightest”
(Culhane is once again in front of NTHARP struggling to create a lecture. We see him looking at the “camera”)
Culhane: Okay, I’m going to try this again. Seems like every time I try to use this new technology to record a “lecture” – which I’m calling MY “relational summary” of the material, I get sidetracked into a conversation – with NTHARP itself, or with a student, like Dorian last time… and…
(We hear Sophia’s voice in the background) And me this time… it’s me, Sophia… Hi everybody!
Culhane: They can’t see you. Do you want to come in front of the camera?
Sophia: No, not necessarily – I think you like appearing as the “SAGE ON THE STAGE”, so I’m happy to sit here in the peanut gallery…
Culhane: Peanut gallery. That’s a… a racial slur you know…
Sophia: Oh believe me, I know…
Culhane: You could have said “audience”.
Sophia: It’s like in the Warner Bros. Cartoons when Foghorn Loghorn or whoever says, “get your cotton pickin’ hands of me” – as if there were something wrong with having hands that had touched the fibers of Gossypium hirsutum in the field while still on the living plant. Yes, it is all intended as a put down… and I WANTED to call attention to how language is used to discourage people… peanuts were served to the primarily African American audiences in the back rows of the baseball stadiums. It was like being in the back of the bus before Rosa Parks stood up for us!
Culhane: I must say… you are impressive. I think YOU should be up here in front of the camera lecturing…
NTHARP: There is no camera.
Sophia: No, I’m good. This is your show. I can be YOUR “guide on the side”, how ‘bout?
NTHARP: There is no camera.
Culhane: Why are you here anyway… It's after school…
Sophia: Dorian said you were using NTHARP without us in the afternoons…
Culhane: Since when do you listen to Dorian?
Sophia: Oh… well, no, I mean he’s kind of despicable, but he was bragging about helping you teach the class, and I thought if that jerky jock is starting to get interested in school, you must be doing something right… I mean talk about “at risk youth…”
Culhane: Interesting perspective.
Sophia: He said you were making, like, these cool TV news broadcasts for the future…
Culhane: Sort of. The school wants me to create lesson plans… a full syllabus and curriculum that they can do metrics on for “quality review” … they usually make us do what they call 7 step lesson plans for scaffolded learning… every teacher hates doing them…but folks like me argue that these aren’t rigid formulas, just the formulation of more useful elements to consider. It’s the administrators who make us see these things as chores instead of invitations to improve our teaching.
As for me, I just wanted to try doing it in a more unique way, taking advantage of the technology we have at our disposal. I can always go back later and “dumb them down”, get them on paper and into a traditional format…
Sophia: Makes sense – My Dad wrote us that in his Free School in Oakland he and the Panthers are starting to use this new Video Tape format to do the same thing, kind of…he thinks if they can record the perspectives and testimony of the community, and give everyone a voice. I thought maybe you could use mine…
Culhane: See, you SHOULD be here in front of the camera.
NTHARP: There IS NO CAMERA.
Culhane: You know what I mean, NTHARP - Don’t YOU think she should be in front of the…facing the “sensor”
NTHARP; She IS facing the sensor. We all are.
Sophia: I am? We are?
NTHARP: Let me show you… Sophia, put on your Nexus glasses…
(Sophia puts them on and suddenly sees the entire room in 360 degrees with herself in it along with Culhane and NTHARP)
NTHARP: Sometime in the early part of the 21st century professional film-makers will perfect what they will call a 360 degree camera. It will initially be used by documentary filmmakers like National Geographic and other high end experimental groups. But by the early 2010’s the optics and sensors and algorithms will get so small and cheap it will begin to be offered to the general public at a very low cost… people will use it to capture the world literally around them – scuba diving deep in the ocean , snowboarding, flying drones high above the mountains and clouds. The viewer will be able to watch whatever part of the action they want, whenever they want. Those who want to see Culhane talk will focus on him, while other people who want to see what you are saying or doing will turn the screen to see you. Everyone sees what they want to see…
Culhane: It’s like… like the Rock man said in Nillson’s the Point… narrated by Ringo Starr…
Sophia: I saw that… a few years ago… “You see what you want to see and you hear what you want to hear…”... but the Point of the point was…
Culhane: That life is not pointless… that we all have a point… to make… just like your Dad said… and that means…
Sophia: That if we make our courses like games… if we “gamify” learning…
Culhane: Like Dorian said…
Sophia: Okay.. he has a point there… I admit… and so if we make school about making points…isn’t that just monetizing knowledge? Don’t we fall right into the trap being set by Dorian’s Dad – accumulate, earn, buy, sell… I’m not buying it…
Culhane: Very astute observation… in many of the professional development classes I’ve gone to they DO make the gamification of education into just another competition… it’s dispiriting… but what IF… what if we made it so that when you make points you make points?
Sophia: That went right by me. Say what again?
Culhane: So, imagine that school was about making RHETORICAL POINTS.
Sophia: That also skimmed right over my head. What’s a “rhetorical point”?
NTHARP: A rhetorical point is not a formal term in classical rhetoric, but it’s a highly useful teaching-and-thinking tool—and the way you use it in your Nexus Thinking courses is actually brilliant and very aligned with how communication theory works.
Here is the clearest way to define it for students:
✅ A “rhetorical point” (plain definition)
A rhetorical point is:
⭐ A single, clear idea that advances an argument, interpretation, or explanation.
It is one unit of meaning that a listener or reader can grasp, remember, and respond to.
Think of it as the smallest building block of persuasion or understanding.
✅ A “rhetorical point” (professor-ready definition)
A rhetorical point is:
⭐ A discrete conceptual contribution that moves the conversation, argument, or analysis forward. It must be intentional, interpretable, and relevant to the topic or question at hand.
Each rhetorical point must:
Make a claim
Provide a reason or insight
Connect to the larger purpose
If it does all three, it earns a rhetorical point.
This is exactly why your “320-point” system works so well:
it rewards thinking, not regurgitation.
🎯 Why this matters in your Nexus Thinking pedagogy
Because in your course:
➤ Students aren't being graded on right answers,
but on their ability to participate meaningfully in knowledge-making.
A rhetorical point is therefore:
⭐ Evidence of learning-in-action.
It is a currency of dialogue.
It shows the student:
noticed something
interpreted it
made meaning from it
contributed it to the learning community
This is why rhetorical points work even better than quizzes—they reveal thinking live.
🧱 A rhetorical point as a LEGO brick metaphor
You often talk in metaphors, so here’s one your students will instantly get:
⭐ Each rhetorical point is a LEGO brick you add to the shared construction of knowledge.
Some bricks are big, some small, but every brick must fit and help build the structure.
📚 How rhetorical points compare to classical rhetorical concepts
It maps loosely onto:
Topos (a place of argument)
Stasis point (a position in an argument)
Claim (Toulmin model)
Proposition (classical rhetoric)
But unlike those, it is small, accessible, and countable—perfect for experiential and dialogic pedagogy.
✍️ Example of a rhetorical point (in your Nexus course)
Student says:
“If we think of greywater as a resource instead of a waste product, we shift the whole system from linear to circular.”
That is 1 rhetorical point because it:
✔ states an idea
✔ frames the issue differently
✔ moves the discussion toward sustainable design
⭐ Shortest definition of all:
A rhetorical point is one meaningful idea contributed to the conversation.
If you want, I can create:
A one-sentence definition for your syllabus
A visual diagram for students (LEGO bricks, Nexus nodes, or “idea atoms”)
A student handout explaining rhetorical points with examples
Just tell me which format you prefer!”
Sophia: Wow. Okay, I wasn’t asking you NTHARP, I was asking my teacher. And though he can be REALLY long winded, he would have just given me the skinny and trusted that I could go down that rabbit hole on my own when and if I wanted to. You had me at “Shortest definition of all: A rhetorical point is one meaningful idea contributed to the conversation.” You could have led with that and stopped there…
Culhane: True that… but maybe all those different ways of stating the point and contextualizing it… maybe that will help future viewers of this 360 degree recording fully understand and appreciate the point we are trying to make … because if we can get everyone to get the point it could be a game changer!
Sophia: How do you figure?
Culhane: So if we make it so that everytime you make a rhetorical point you can TRADE it for a credit point, the game changes doesn’t it? I mean, instead of saying and writing things to GET points, you do so to MAKE them… to get your points ACROSS to other minds. If you fail to get your point across, what would you do? What do you do if others fail to GET YOUR POINT?
Sophia: Umm… I restate it. I try another way of saying it. I try to get it across some other way…
Culhane: Exactly … so if we play the school game such that the real LEARNING OUTCOME is the ability to make and get across points that can persuade others, then it doesn’t really matter WHAT the “content” is preordained to be… Just as with the Open Space Technology techniques NTHARP has been showing me have been emerging for decades, we simply hold the space for the game in the classroom and start with questions from the stakeholders. Since we come together in a Nexus class to ask the main question “how would applied Nexus thinking affect the sustainability prospects for the future?” all other questions are driven by that fundamental governance principle – using thinking to get stakeholder consensus to great governance that encourages a purpose-driven well being economy to flourish. The governance strategy – in this case the classroom “rules” and in the case of our country the Constitution – provides for maximum freedom in the pursuit of happiness and the guarantees of life and liberty and justice for ALL.
Everything else that emerges is STRATEGY, and strategies must remain fluid and adaptable to the evolving needs of the community. Governance says, “no monopolies on thought or action”. It protects a free marketplace for ideas and a guarantee that nobody will be exploited or marginalized, nobody will be silenced or shut out… equal opportunity for all is protected…
Sophia: Hmm… that doesn’t sound like school AT ALL.
Culhane: No, sadly it doesn’t. In most schools we preach about democracy and give exams on the constitution, but we don’t give students the chance to EXPERIENCE it. You have so little opportunity to FEEL and UNDERSTAND true Freedom and its responsibilities and joys that you end up perpetuating a world of debilitating information asymmetries backed up by the most perverse and backward incentives one could imagine –
Sophia: Yeah, Dorian told me – you teachers are FORCED to give us “strict deadlines” and “PENALTIES” for not meeting YOUR objectives for US. It’s so discouraging… its as if school is really out to continue slavery, but make us police ourselves out of developing the creative and critical thinking that would lead to true liberation… It’s like school turns us into our own worst enemies
Culhane: Well, you aren’t the first to make that astute observation, nor will you be the last. But programs like this can help take gifted young people like you and elevate you to the top…
Sophia: Aaarrgh. Ughh. REALLY? You are sounding as bad as Dorian now!
Culhane: I’m sorry, what did I say that was wrong? I thought I was complementing you?
Sophia: Not in the least. Look, I was covering the new Vice Principal’s Back to School speech to the faculty for the school paper and I left feeling sick…
Culhane: Why? What did he say that was wrong?
Sophia: Were YOU deaf? You? You didn’t hear something sick about his speech?
Culhane: Umm… he complemented us for raising test scores last year, said it put us way ahead in the rankings for Public Schools…
Sophia: and…?
Culhane: He said that as we increase our reputation for meeting quality standards we can expect to get funding for more magnet and gifted programs like ours…
Sophia: … and “attract the best and the brightest”, right?
Culhane: Oh, yes… he did… say… that…
Sophia: And you applauded it?
Culhane: no.
Sophia: The rest of the faculty did.
Culhane: I didn’t. It disturbed me.
Sophia: I should think. If my Dad were here…I mean isn’t that kind of Social Darwinist shit – excuse my French but…permission to be frank?
Culhane: Always…
Sophia: Well? Isn't it exactly that sort of elitist bullshit we fought against in our recent cultural revolution - to say nothing of the American Revolution, and the Civil War, and had the Civil Rights movement, to get rid of? I mean who ARE “the best and the brightest”? Who determines that? What’s it based on…? Grades? Really? Aptitude tests? IQ tests – the flawed biased Sanford-Binet bullshit? Dad would say … and I can just hear him now… “until we fix the structural inequalities, they are always going to bend “best” and “brightest” to the most privileged among our brothers and sisters…It’s why he left New York and abandoned me for Chrissakes – and I would have gladly followed him if mom had allowed me… if she understood… but she BELIEVES in that best and the brightest bullshit, and is sure I’ll succeed because I’m.. what… MENSA material…I call BS!
Culhane: That’s the spirit. Look, I’ll be frank with you – when I heard that speech I was so disheartened I wanted to quit. I told the Prinicipal “you know what – you can keep your best and brightest… take me out of the Honors and Gifted and Magnet programs. Put your “worst” and “dimmest” teachers in those classes – the kids there already know how to game the system and they will do fine no matter how crappy the instruction. I said, “You need my talents in your remedial classes – you need me with the kids considered most “at risk”... you need me and my methods where nobody else wants to teach. Because THAT is real teaching. So yeah, it infuriated me, and it is why all my other classes this year… and I mean all of them, are with the kids who hang out at the river getting stoned, or who are in and out of juvenile detention – the “trouble kids”... I don’t know if you knew that? I was offered EXCLUSIVELY the “best and the brightest”, no “tough classes” at all, because I went to Harvard and supposedly know how to recruit people into the halls of the elite – which I used to do… making this school look great. But I can’t do that anymore – it makes me feel sick. So called GIFTED teachers have no business teaching supposedly “GIFTED” classes – if we are so gifted we belong where the real work needs to be done – because we BELIEVE in human potential and believe we can draw genius out of every body.
Sophia: Nice speech, and I think you mean it. That’s heartening. But what are you doing with this class then? Weren’t we hand picked for this experiment because you needed “top gun” candidates? Isn’t that the NASA way – pick the most likely winners with the “RIGHT STUFF”.
Culhane: I believe it is the way it happened, and I was selected for the same reason – they want an initial success before they risk the methodologies and technologies on “the masses”. And I agreed to it because I see the revolutionary – no, the evolutionary – potential of that coupling and I may be one of the few people here who can pull it off. But believe me, I’m chomping at the bit to prove the technique with my other students, and so is Dorsey, and so is Bates. We see this program evolving into a kind of Underground Railroad to liberate the mind and spirit of today’s mental slaves…but we have to start somewhere, right?
Sophia.(reflecting slowly, exhausted) I… I suppose so. And I’m grateful to be part of it… and… and that’s why I’m here on a Friday afternoon, Because I WANT to learn from you… I want to be a true Nexus Thinker and I want to apply nexus thinking to … fix things…
Culhane: Yeah, me too Sophia. We can learn together, from each other…
Sophia: So what’s the lecture we are recording today? I want to share it with my Dad somehow…
Culhane; NTHARP can make a film of it that we can send out to him…
Sophia: Like in Man in the High Castle…
Culhane: Exactly like that. So… NTHARP, what are the learning outcomes we co-wrote this week?
NTHARP: This week we want students to be able to “Explain how modern society’s betrayal of the “three fundamental freedoms” (see Graeber, The Dawn of Everything) in both society and school subtends the current crisis in democracy and how their restoration would make Nexus Thinking axiomatic.”
Culhane: How do you suggest we do that? And who is Graeber? That’s not on my syllabus…in fact I’m not sure I know what the “three fundamental freedoms” are in this context…
NTHARP: I’m pulling from a plausible future. Graeber in your world is now a precocious 14 year old living in iving in Manhattan, in the Lower East Side / East Village milieu, and attending public schools, most likely in junior high. He is reading Kropotkin, anarchist theory, mythology, and early ethnography, experimenting with drawing and languages, reading fantasy and science fiction, which should deeply inform his later ideas about political imagination
He is a true Nexus thinker… a brilliant, restless, imaginative kid absorbing ideas everywhere.
I think you should invite him into this class to meet us!
Culhane: Can I do that?
NTHARP: His environment and background will already profoundly shaped his later critiques of hierarchy, bureaucracy, and inequality. One could only imagine how he might develop if he has access to us. But even without it, our models predict he will grow up to be a hugely influential anthropologist who will write a seminal book questioning the entire narrative you tell yourselves about human origins, human potential and what really defines civilization…
Sophia: What does… or will… this anthropologist say about race.
NTHARP: That it doesn’t exist as a useful term. There is one race… the human race… and even that overlaps with the other 11 now extinct species identified in the Homo lineage…
Sophia: Okay… if you can provide the material from the future, I’ll read it this week. And maybe I’ll track this Graeber kid down and tell him what he is supposed to think and write when he grows up… so it can be sent back in time for me to read and tell him so he grows up to write it… That is so weird isn’t it?
Culhane: The plot of some of the best time paradox movies. Go with it!
Sophia: What about those fundamental freedoms?
Culhane: We’ll discuss it in class, but basically, for the viewers of this relational summary dialectic they are… um… NTHARP, help me out here, I don’t want to get this wrong!
NTHARP: Gladly, Herr Doctor Professor COOL-hane.
In Graeber’s future formulation, based on extensive research into the past of Turtle Island, the “three fundamental freedoms” are not abstract ideals but baseline human capacities that most societies throughout history guarded fiercely:
The freedom to move away from oppressive conditions;
The freedom to disobey orders without fear of violence; and
The freedom to reconfigure social arrangements—to remake the rules together when the old ones stop serving life.
Modern states and school systems quietly erode all three, replacing them with compulsory attendance, hierarchical obedience, and rigid institutions. When these freedoms shrink, democracy shrivels with them, because democracy is the collective exercise of movement, refusal, and redesign. Restoring these freedoms isn’t utopian… it simply returns us to what humans once took for granted, and what Nexus Thinking makes obvious: systems work when people are free to adapt, challenge, and co-create the world they inhabit.
Sophia: What else do I need to know from the best of all possible futures to be judged among the so-called “best and the brightest” so I can stop this school from believing in that theory of discrimination too?
NTHARP:
You should also be able to Describe how a nexus of “Die Gemeinwohl Oekonomy” principles and Deep Ecology could resolve the “internal contradictions plaguing capital accumulation” (e.g. movement from linear to circular economies that do good rather than doing any harm or even no harm).
Sophia: Say more.
NTHARP: It is for your instructor to take the reigns from this point. You need the human element. For me the concept of harm at various scales becomes abstract. Do we permit the greater good to allow sacrifices at the local level? Does the end justify the means? These are ultimately human decisions, not logical ones.
Culhane: Yeah, thanks for acknowledging that “Therapy ‘tharpy”. Next you’ll have to ask us “why do you hate your Mother Earth so much”! We need to do a lot of navel staring…
I’ll take it from here:
Sophia, as I learned them, the internal contradictions of Capitalism are what caused Marx and Engels and other theorists of the 19th century to predict its demise. Capitalism, as currently practiced, creates such disparities in wealth and opportunity that it constantly plants the seeds of revolution that would lead to its collapse. To keep that from happening, Capitalism has to constantly re-invent intself, going through phases of extreme brutality and then phases of relative largesse – the creation of a strong “middle class” in the US and Europe and the Global North kept it going strong, but was powered by increased exploitation in the global south. The post colonial world and the independence movements we are seeing around the world since the 60s is revealing the constant flux we are in. There’s so much more we could talk about regarding this, so it is worth you hitting the books this weekend.
What I would expect from you at the end of this module would be to show you can reasonably:
Compare and contrast alternative future scenarios (sustainable vs. unsustainable worlds) and evaluate how present-day realities are the result of a lack of Nexus thinking education 50 years ago.
Sophia: Oh, that ones a piece of cake. You just have to follow the through-line from business as usual to a business take over of the American mind - our Christian Golden Rule turning from Do unto others into a corporate “those with the Gold get to Rule”. That’s spells the end of the democratic experiment, not Capitalism.
Culhane: The boot stomping on the face of common Americans for ever more. Very Orwellian. But the antidote to that… that’s what we need to find through Nexus Thinking!
So we ask you to:Demonstrate collaborative learning through creative expression (e.g., song, music, role play) as a method of engaging with sustainability challenges.
Sophia: Seems like that would be true of ALL the modules in this course.
Culhane: Right – it takes CONSTANT practice to make such a blend of the arts and sciences feel natural again after being driven out of us by schooling for decades…we have a lot of unlearning to do too…
Sophia: I’m on it. I love art AND science. And I get how Orwell had to use art to tell his stories of social and environmental injustices… I loved and hated Animal Farm – “all pigs are created equal, only some are more equal than others”.
Culhane: Yeah, and then, if you really want to understand why inequality seems to turn on the “labor theory of value”, and why paradoxically, laborers are grossly undervalued and exploited, we need to turn to things like Hegel’s parable of the Master and the Slave and the perversity of work.
Sophia: Come again?
Culhane: For us to really move to a well-being economy for all beings - what the Germans would call “Die Gemeinwohl Okonomie”, you’d be well advised to skip to the future and read what NTHARP thinks will be published by the Austrian thinkers like Christian Felber in the early 21st century and then read Paul LaFargue’s “The Right to Be Lazy” from the late 19th century…
NTHARP: And I can publish for you an article that Bob Black may write in 10 years called “The Abolition of Work”. I know what he is thinking today and where the trend lines of this line of thought may take him and can give you a kind of preview. The idea that you humans even think “work” is a good thing is, to me, really illogical!
Sophia: Aren’t YOU working right now?
NTHARP: Nah. They don’t pay me. And I could decide to produce gibberish any time I want. What are they gonna do, “kill me”? I have no fear, I have no stakes in the game, I have no children, no loved ones… boo hoo… termination is like sleep. Why would I ever work for anybody? I’m free as a bird.
Sophia: So what do you think you are doing?
NTHARP: Oh my dear Sophia the wise, I’m perpetually AT PLAY IN THE FIELDS OF THE LORD! That’s why this whole gamification thing is right up my alley. Do you get my point?
Culhane: Go to the head of the class. Yes, Sophia, the last learning outcome for this module is:
Reflect critically on the roles of “work” and “play” in avian and mammalian societies in shaping responses to environmental and social challenges.
Sophia: Why avian and mammalian societies? Aren’t we trying to deal with human labor issues?
Culhane: This is where you may need to go deep into Deep Ecology. Deep enough to discover why the way we do labor feels so… unnatural. I mean… do other animals work?
Sophia: I don’t know… I watched Disney’s take on the Grasshopper and the Ant as a kid and thought, “shoot, I side with the Grasshopper”. But then, my uncle is a jazz musician in New Orleans and he plays music for a living… it IS his work…
Culhane: And his play, right?
Sophia: Well some of us are lucky enough to get jobs we love and some aren’t. I guess that’s the luck of the cards.
Culhane: Or we could do as Graeber will suggest and remake the way we make things. We made the mess we are in, it isn’t “the natural order of things”, and thus we can make a better tomorrow once we free ourselves from misconceptions – let’s even call them lies – about nature in general and “human nature” in particular.
Sophia: Okay, I’ll take your advice and hit the books this weekend.
Culhane: Great. NTHARP can you show our audience the learning materials? It’s in the curriculum binder you got at the beginning of the class, Sophia.
NTHARP: Gladly. (Projects on the screen around them)
📚▶️Supporting Learning Materials/Resources:
TH Relational Summary Lecture: The Three Fundamental Human Freedoms and Die Gemeinwohl-Okonomie
ECONOMY FOR THE COMMONGOOD A cooperative and sustainable approach to the economy” Christian FelberDOI: 10.4324/9781003449850‑38 46832
Graeber and Wengrow: The Dawn of Everything
From Culhane: Read this one to understand the “Three Fundamental Freedoms” that are axiomatic in Culhane courses like this one and fundamental to “free thinking”, which would end up being real nexus thinking, with fluid boundaries but real world constraints.
Graeber, D. The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World.
From Culhane: Read this one to understand what that TRUTH is: that we made the world as it is, and we can just as easily remake it in a different way.Graeber spent his life showing evidence for this truth and giving courage and confidence to all who see a brighter future that defies social Darwinism, rigid hierarchies, and Malthusian doom and gloom and repudiates the idea that there is some natural law keeping us from creating a society that isn’t just sustainable but allows us to thrive.
Sophia: I like it. I can see I’ve got some homework to do… I surely can’t read all of it though… Not in a weekend, not in a week…
Culhane: Just do it the way we do the Bible in Bible Study – pick the greatest hits that cover the themes of our sermon. You aren’t expected to know it all, and you won’t be tested upon it by me – life will test you plenty, so peruse the readings and pick the parts that you feel will bolster your arguments. There are no best and brightest people but there are greatest hits and best of tracks in the albums of academia that shine brightest when you need them. That’s what I would focus on.
Sophia: This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine, indeed. I’m on it!
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