Translator: Tanya Cushman
Reviewer: Peter van de Ven Thank you. One of the first things
that I feel as if I have to do is to help you see the whole phrase
"Socratic practice" fresh. I understand that at UFM
we've been doing things that are called Socratic practice, and many wonderful things have happened, but maybe there's some confusion. All over the world, the term "Socratic"
has these heavy overtones of some old, dead, gray, Greek guy
in a marble face and so forth. And it's hard to really get excited
about that as a disruptive technology. So I'm going to try
to help you see things fresh. For me, what I love most,
what I'm most fascinated about, is creativity, innovation
and entrepreneurship. And so you might say, "What does Socratic practice have to do with creativity,
innovation and entrepreneurship?" I'm going to start
by telling you a little story from Malcolm Gladwell in "Outliers." He describes a situation in which a Korean jetliner
is flying in the dark in bad weather in the middle of the Pacific, headed towards an island. And the copilot senses something wrong, and he says to the pilot something like, "Perhaps, Sir, you ought
to check your gauge," and the pilot just keeps going
and doesn't pay any attention. A bit later, the copilot says, "I wonder if we maybe
should check the gauge," you know, and does this a couple of times, and then the plane crashes
into a mountain and everybody's dead, and, you know, it's horrible. But what Gladwell says is that
they discovered that in South Korea, it's a very authoritarian,
hierarchical society, and as a consequence, the copilot does not feel comfortable
telling the pilot, "Stop! Look at the gauge. We're going to die." No; it's "Well, maybe,
you might want to consider this." I often stop and wonder, what does it feel like to be that copilot,
knowing that you're going to die, knowing that everybody
on the plane's going to die, but you don't have the courage within to overrule the pilot's judgment
or even to bring it up? For me, it just must be
the strangest interior feeling - I can't even imagine it. I bring that up because,
rightly or wrongly, Gladwell cites a study
when he tells that story that claims that South Korea is the most hierarchical
and authoritarian culture on earth. But Guatemala is number two. May or may not be true, but I've known a lot of Americans
who come down to Guatemala, and they are struck
by the respect for authority and submission to authority that is characteristic and typical here. So for that reason, I am especially appreciative of Giancarlo's, I would say,
visionary leadership in introducing Socratic practice into UFM because I believe it's the first time there's been a deliberate,
orchestrated, concentrated attempt through a major institution in a country to shift norms away from submission to those sorts of hierarchies
and authorities towards thinking for yourself. So whether or not it works, I think it's a brilliant
and beautiful experiment, and I just wanted
to acknowledge that early on. I'm going to shift now
to a different context: I'm going to go way back
to Ancient Greece. And instead of Socrates,
I'm going to go even earlier, to Antigone. Antigone, famous Greek play,
Sophocles, a legend separate from that, and in the play Antigone, her uncle Creon has gone to war
with Polynices, her brother, and killed Polynices. Polynices is dead on the battlefield, and Creon, because he believes
Polynices betrayed him, has declared that Polynices' body must be left to rot
and be eaten by the vultures. Ugly, ugly scene. Antigone didn't like this. She says, "According to divine law,
we must bury our dead. It's a sacred law to bury our dead." But Creon said, "No, this guy betrayed me. Uh uh, we're not burying him;
let the vulture eat him." The chorus in Greek plays often goes
back and forth to evaluate things, and the chorus in the play Antigone is full of "Gosh, we need
to respect our King Creon, but gosh, divine law
really does say bury the dead. What are we going to do?" I bring this up as a very early incident in what I would call
the history of individuality or the history of consciousness - in a sense, the very, very beginnings
of independent thought. The man named Julian Jaynes
wrote a book called "The [Origin] of Consciousness
in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind," and according to Jaynes -
who may or may not be right, but I think it's a great story,
so I'm going to keep it - the right brain, what we think
of as the synthetic, creative brain, you know, we dream with our right brain, according to Jaynes, the right brain is
the voice of God and the voice of society. It's the kind of voice
that tells you what to do. The left brain is kind
of the analytic, strategic. We think of it as, you know, math
and verbal logic and so forth, reasoning. And according to Jaynes, we didn't really become
conscious individuals until we started getting neuronal traffic
from the left and right hemisphere, as left and right brain had to start
talking to each other a lot more. And so an incident such as Antigone, where divine law, Creon,
divine law, Creon - it's all of a sudden, woops, got to go
back and forth, got to figure this out. And I see that as a really
important example of the early origins
of thinking for ourselves. The Greek chorus didn't do
a great job of that necessarily, but a couple hundred years later, you have Socrates really systematically
asking people questions, getting them to think for themselves. Of course, he was put to death
for corrupting the young and teaching the young
not to believe in the gods of the polis, the city of Athens, so something was going on there. I mean, we might say the Athenians were just dumb
for putting Socrates to death, or we might say we're playing
with some pretty fundamental stuff when we start asking people questions
that separate them from the authorities. I want to go through another vignette. This time we're at Harvard in the 1950s, and there's an experiment
in social psychology where there's a series of lines - about four or five lines
of the same length and then one much smaller - and in this experiment,
we've got about ten people, but nine of them
are part of the experiment and only one is the subject. And the way it goes
is every person is asked, "Are these lines the same size or not?" And the nine people, who know darn well
they're not the same size, all say, "Yeah,
they're exactly the same size." And you get to the last person -
they're like, "What?" But it turns out, two-thirds
of the people in the last position will say, "Yep, they're the same size." Again, as with the Korean copilot, what are these two-thirds people thinking? They've got to know
they're not the same size. Or do they actually believe
they're the same size? What's going on here? One-third, to their credit,
do say they're not the same size, and those people are usually
outraged at everybody else: "You idiots, can't you see?
They're different. You know. Hello." So it's kind of a dramatic difference: on the one hand, submitting to the group - submitting whether it's to an authority
above you or a group around you - submitting to the group
versus thinking for yourself. Thinking for yourself,
in a way, is such a cliché. I mean, you know, everybody
thinks that they think for themselves. Nobody would say, "No,
I don't think for [myself]; I let that guy think for me." Never. You never hear that. But when it gets down to it, I think it's much harder
to really think for ourselves than we realize, and we're far more deeply
biologically programmed to submit to authorities, whether it's society as a whole
or authorities in our lives, be it bosses or parents
or churches or university professors or the media or whatever. I think that it's far more of a struggle
to come to our own understanding of who we are and what
our role is in the world and what we believe is authentically
true, good and beautiful than most of us realize. For me, when I began
doing Socratic inquiry in classrooms, I simply - they were called
Socratic seminars, based on a tradition that I'd come from - but I began calling it a Socratic practice because just like, I mean, kind of the practice of learning
how to become a better winemaker or the practice of learning
to play the violin, a practice in the Aristotelian sense is something you do over and over again
in an effort to become excellent at it. There are standards and aspirations of what you need to do
to become truly superb at this practice. So for me, instead of either we think
let other people think for us or we think for ourselves, for me, it's a life-long practice to begin to take responsibility
for my own learning, my own thought, my own ideas and manifesting those ideas
in the world at large. Even as I've been doing this
for a long time, I constantly feel pressures
to be like everybody else; I constantly feel pressures to submit. That's why I'm always putting myself
in the place of that Korean copilot or the last person
in this experiment at Harvard. You know, I'm superbly aware of, What does it mean to push out
against this world? Feels like this huge pressure: be like everybody else. Give you one little example. It may sound silly, but it's a way
in which I test this practice in all sorts of - as it were - silly ways. There's a period in my life
when I was doing tai chi. If I was a good person, I'd still
be doing tai chi, but I'm imperfect. But at one point, I was in the Dallas airport
with a long layover and feeling kind of all messed up, and I thought, "I should
really calm down by doing tai chi." And, you know, Dallas - full of cowboys,
cowboy hats, big guys, cowboy boots - okay, I'm going to do this. And so I, you know -
and I started doing tai chi, and at first, it was like, "Oh everybody's looking at me.
What am I doing? Am I a weirdo?" But then I started to get into it,
started to calm down. I thought, "I need to do
what's right for me. If this is going to make me
calmer and more effective when I get to my meetings
on the other side, I need to do it, and why can't a Dallas cowboy
let me do tai chi, you know?" But it was one of those
interesting experiments, and every once in a while, just try to do what you think
is right for you no matter what's happening
in the world at large. And as you become conscious of when you are submitting
to outside authority versus when you're pushing out against it, you will gradually become
ever more refined at learning what levels
society is pushing on you and it's not really authentically you. And it's up to you whether or not
you want to be you. Maybe you don't want to be you;
maybe you like being society. Again, I don't mean
to be entirely facetious. One of the texts that I like to use
when I start Socratic practice in classes is Kant's "What is Enlightenment?" And he basically says we need to have the courage
to think for ourselves, and people that don't think for themselves
are either lazy or cowardly. And I like to put that
in front of groups of students because nobody wants
to be lazy and cowardly, so it's kind of like
in your face sort of thing. But sometimes, they do kind of say, "Well, why should we
have to figure this out? Somebody else could
figure it out for us, right? Why don't you just tell us what it means?" I say, "Okay, I'm happy
to tell you what Kant means, but if so, I also want the right
to tell you how to dress, what religion to believe in,
what political views to have. If you're not going to take responsibility
for thinking for yourself, then I should take responsibility
for doing all of your thinking." Of course: "No, no, no. I want to know how to dress and so forth
and my own political opinions." We get into a conversation in which they really start
to evaluate who they are and where they think for themselves
and where they don't. But I don't tell them
what Kant means, at all. And one of the ways in which
I typically lead Socratic discussions is to attempt to not let students know
which way I'm going in things. I've had students in discussions say,
"What answer do you want?" I'm like, "I don't want any answer;
I want you to think for yourself, I want you to evaluate the evidence, come back to me with whatever
the evidence tells you, authentically, and then let's talk about your personal
relationship to the evidence - and here we're talking
evidence in the text - and the relationship to the evidence
in the text that other students have, and then we compare it. And by means of working together
in an authentic, honest conversation, I believe we will come up with a more true and accurate expression
of the true, the good and the beautiful as relates to an accurate
understanding of the text, which may sound melodramatic, but it turns out that when people authentically try
to understand what's going on and they're authentically engaged
in conversation with other people, in my experience, they do approach a much more accurate
understanding of reality. For me, understanding a text
is a microcosm of understanding reality. And they also have to learn, again - have the courage of their own opinions. Sometimes people think, "That person
over there is smart; I'm dumb. Let's let the smart person
tell us what it means." That's true even if I as leader don't tell
the students what the text means, they often turn to the kid
that they think is smartest: Oh, what does a smart person say?
That's what it really means. But as you have these conversations, you find very often the so-called smart person
also doesn't know - they're missing all kinds of things. And one of the experiences that I try to develop
over and over again with students is the fact that no matter how allegedly smart,
expert, mature or whatever people are, no one can see all of reality. Reality is infinitely complex, and because reality is infinitely complex, each of us has a personal obligation to learn an accurate expression
of our relationship to that reality and tell the world about it. If you don't tell the world
what reality is like for you, you're going to have the equivalent
of planes crashing into mountains. That's, again, a kind
of a heavy sort of thing to say, but I really think that the world will be a much more happy,
peaceful, prosperous, healthy place when each of us learns to tell our truth
in an honest and respectful manner vis-à-vis other people. So, with that in mind, I want to talk about some ways
in which I've seen young people disrupted. Often, students, when you first start
going into a classroom and ask them questions
without telling them answers, they are frustrated and angry: "Come on, you're supposed
to tell us what's going on. We're supposed to learn it
and spit it back to you. What's this stupid game
where you tell us nothing? You're not teaching, you're irresponsible,
you're wasting our time." I've heard some remarkable anecdotes
about Albert Loan here at UFM where early on some students
were really frustrated at him for not telling them the answer, and they were about ready
to mutiny and so forth. This applies both to students at UFM
and sometimes faculty at UFM. Albert, to his credit, stuck by his guns, and bit by bit, some of the most resistant students
and some of the most resistant professors realized that, in fact,
it is valuable and important to be in a situation where the leader
puts responsibility on the students for coming up with their own ideas, and although at first, it appears to be
an abdication of responsibility on behalf of Albert or myself
or any of us that teach this way, gradually, one realizes
it's one of the greatest gifts - to be put in a situation in which
you have to come up with your own ideas. And I want to connect that now
to the notion of ideas changing the world. UFM was founded on a idea, and I believe - you know, for me, doing tai chi
at the Dallas airport, trivial idea of putting
an idea in this world - Muso, believing in the ideas behind UFM and that those ideas could create
prosperity and eliminate poverty - I think Muso was brilliant, and creating a whole institution
to manifest those ideas was brilliant. To take a different example. You know, Steve Jobs - amazing, recently Apple became the most
largely capitalized company in the world - beat out Exxon a couple weeks ago - truly amazing. Steve Jobs - you know,
little hippie kid in the 1970s, got fired from his company
in a high-profile way in the 1980s, looked like he was
totally a loser out of it. Late '90s looked like Apple
is a dead company. Now it's the most successful company
on earth, by many measures. Steve Jobs had an idea
and he stuck with it. He had the conviction and the courage
of his ideas to make them real, and he's absolutely changed
the world as a consequence. Go to Giancarlo - again, Giancarlo has brought both Bert
and me down here and other people, and Giancarlo supported
the Socratic program in the face of a culture
that was often very resistant, a culture that often felt more comfortable
with hierarchy and authority than a culture where people
were comfortable discussing ideas and defending their ideas openly. I think Giancarlo was
a powerful visionary for doing that. If UFM continues to do this, I see UFM really being the first case where a culture would change
from authoritarian - perhaps one of the most
authoritarian on earth - to one in which there was a vibrant, I will say, Silicon Valley
of intellectual expression, where people became creative,
innovative and entrepreneurial by means of thinking of their own ideas
and manifesting those ideas in reality. So finally, I want to go back
to this feeling inside: What does it feel like to have everybody else say the lines
are equal when you know they're not? What does it feel like for the copilot
to know that the plane's about to crash? What does it feel like when you sit there
and you know that something is not right, and you're not telling the world
that it's not right? I would say that the ultimate
disruptive technology is you. Every time you are an authentic,
honest expression of your own belief - in the true, the good and the beautiful - on whatever issue, no matter how trivial,
not matter how profound, that if you come into the world
as an honest person and tell us what you believe, not what the authorities have told you,
not what society tells you but what your inner genius tells you, this is what is real about the world, then you are the disruptive technology
that will change the world. And as cool as iPads are, you are even cooler than iPads. Thank you. (Applause)
