When our existing ways of thinking break down, it’s the rebels and the renegades, those who dare to think differently, who need to reboot the system.
We are going through a time of enormous and accelerating change. Our institutions, our value systems and even the way we make sense of the world are crumbling. At the same time, social media is pushing us further and further into ideological camps, and many of us feel we can’t fully express ourselves.
The rebels recognise that these old structures have to die for the new to be born. They embrace uncertainty and see hope in chaos.
The Rebel Wisdom Summit is a new kind of event; an immersive, participatory, evolutionary conversation bringing together four of the most rebellious thinkers in the world to help us find a path through the chaos of the times.
Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying are evolutionary biologists. They are members of the recently coined informal ‘Intellectual Dark Web’, a group of thinkers trying to have difficult conversations that are absent from the mainstream media. They bring a deep desire to create a better world, while understanding that the tools we have been given are our evolutionary toolkit. In particular that we are hardwired for tribalism, and that we have to repurpose our biological hardware to survive. See the Rebel Wisdom film, ‘
Having a real conversation‘ for more.
Psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist is increasingly being recognised as one of the most profound and challenging thinkers of our age. His book ‘Master and Emissary’ was a sensation, in it he drew a clear and compelling story of how the history of the western world was best viewed as a gradual takeover by the rational, logical left side of the brain, eclipsing the more holistic right brain. We believe his work offers a hope of integrating many of the divisions in today’s culture. A short animation of his thought can be found
here.
And futurist Jordan Greenhall has built a reputation as something of a modern oracle with his ‘Deep Code’ essays, making sense of an increasingly chaotic and unpredictable world. His analysis of the Trump insurgency in the wake of the 2016 election went viral (read
here), and he has followed it up with some of the most insightful explanations of the kind of thinking – and specifically collective intelligence – required to find solutions for our most pressing problems. This is almost certainly his only public event this year. He outlines his thought more clearly
in this conversation on Rebel Wisdom.
As the old collapses, we’re entering a new and very different phase in culture and politics. What that might eventually look like, nobody knows. But in order to get there, we’re going to need a new kind of wisdom; open-minded, nuanced, and above all, rebellious.
