Exploring the Psychosocial Essence

From Unsplash - Anastasia Emelyanova - @liquet

Getting ourselves out of social systems also means getting out of ourselves.

We need to embrace the complexity of psychosocial phenomena and dig in to how they work and how we can shape them for a liberatory future. We need to abandon the idea of only thinking about social systems separate from our psychologies, or vice versa. Everything in the human world is psychosocial. There is no separating the psychological from the social, or if there is, it’s extremely limited and would be an interesting research idea for someone else. If we want to move beyond existing social systems, it’s because we want to have better psychological experiences. If we want to move beyond these systems, we need to update our understanding of the psychosocial essence.

We are the social systems, and social systems are us. Escaping from these existing systems requires us to escape from ourselves. It’s not like being a human in a corn maze, where you can escape the maze, and still be you. It’s more like being the corn in a corn maze, and you have to realize that you are the maze to no longer be the maze. You would have to change who you are to change the game.

There are many more metaphors that can get us closer to understanding the psychosocial essence. We need to understand the essence of psychosocial-ness. Much of our dialogue now is about the either the social or the psychological, but not their shared essence. When we understand that essence, we can then examine it and shape it in a way that transforms the roots of our society. That means shaping each of ourselves, as well as the larger social properties that emerge from ourselves. Doing so also results in broader psychosocial possibilities than what our common debates reflect now.

Redesign Everything helps us understand the essence of being psychosocial creatures, so that we can allow a better psychosocial existence to emerge from that understanding. I’ve released my manuscript of version 1, and am now working on a more coherent, illustrated, and shorter version 2. I am making this the center of my life, and I’d appreciate your support behind this purpose!

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