John Arquilla on Noopolitik
Video via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFVUr0-mH0o
Description
"John Arquilla - Geopolitical strategist and co creator of a new paradigm for international relations called Noopolitik. Discussion of Noopolitik, based on the principals of soft power, as a replacement of the hard power Cold War strategy of Realpolitik. In order to evolve in the direction of a noospheric global superorganism, we need a new approach to politics that encourages international cooperation.
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John had originally encountered the idea of the Noosphere in high school, when his French class was assigned a passage from Teilhard’s L’Apparition de L’Homme, (The Appearance of Men). In that passage, as John told us, Teilhard pointed out “that humanity had a choice between extinction and transformation”. That clear contrast appealed to him. Early in his life it inspired him with a positive vision of what humanity could become—if we chose the path of transformation. In the conversation with David Sloan Wilson, he explains how reading Teilhard’s ideas in L’Apparition de L’Homme affected him during the turbulent times of 1968:
“It seemed to me that Teilhard offered a great hope for us and suggested that this third story that humankind brings to the world—the idea of a realm of the mind—succeeds the geosphere, the hot rock of the earth as it was formed, and the biosphere, when life emerged. And now the true purpose of existence is manifested in the rise of humans who can create a thinking circuit around the world, this Noosphere, this third story of the world. And it offered the possibility of transformation and of creating something of great beauty and harmony, as opposed to what I remember in that same essay, he called mankind’s open sore, which was the notion of constant conflict that somehow we lived in an anarchic world where people did what they would, the strong did what they would, and the weak suffered what they must.”
That anarchic world of constant conflict was where Realpolitik was taking humanity. It was a self-destructive path—the path of extinction instead of transformation. But if Realpolitik couldn’t take us toward a cooperative noosphere that functioned at a global scale, what could? In the conversation he describes how he and David Ronfeldt first came together to reimagine geopolitics from a noospheric perspective — a perspective they deemed critical to humanity’s success."
(https://www.humanenergy.io/science-of-the-noosphere-series/noopolitik-and-realpolitik)