I first heard the term cohesive pluralism from Game B pioneer Jim Rutt and he recently mentioned it again on X.
A key Game B idea is "Coherent Pluralism" that holds that rather than expecting everybody to converge on a single way of living such as hyper financialized late stage Game A, we can build many ways to thrive as humans around a very small number of core ideas.
GameB thinking requires a massive shift in not being concerned with how others choose to live. For example one can imagine two Game B communities a mile apart; one that forbids abortion on penalty of expulsion and [one that] makes abortion mandatory - no children to be born to members of the community. Intentionally extreme examples of the idea, but both at least in theory could be Game B ok so long as both:
1. live within world average long term sustainable burden on our planetary systems.
2. organize their communities for human wellbeing as THEY define it (in writing) .
3. Provide easy exit for those who want to leave.
4. Operate their governance mechanisms with radical transparency especially with respect to financial matters.
While there is much I admire about Jim Rutt, he is far too libertarian for my taste. I agree with his approach of seeking to identify a small number of core ideas on which we all agree. Beyond the core, anything goes, live and let live. Jim provides an extreme example of how this approach could work in practice in a Game B world. I am not convinced.
Since retiring to Mexico in 2012, I have been slowly building my knowledge about its culture and history. Part of the story involves the Mayans and the Aztecs and both of these peoples practiced child sacrifice. The adults believed that their wellbeing required the ritualistic killing of children. I do not want to live in a Game B community which coexists with another Game B community that accepts this practice. It seems to me that Jim’s four core principles are necessary but not sufficient for the better world we long for.
My example is more extreme than Jim’s but hopefully it stimulates some thinking about what all humanity could possibly agree on.
Personally, I do not want to live in a world where parents are completely free to instill dogma in their children. It is not hard for me to imagine a world in which parents teach their children THE ONE TRUE WAY TO ACHIEVE WELLBEING. It seems to me that we have a lot of that now in Game A. Nor do I want to live in a world where the State can override the will of the parents. I do not know how to resolve this paradox but for me the matter is not as simple as Jim makes it out to be.
For a good primer on this subject, Rhys Lindmark has a video #8 What Is Coherent Pluralism?
Coherent Pluralism is the epistemological stance to see from many perspectives while still creating coherence among them.
For me, pluralism is the easy part. The challenge is cohesion. How do we achieve cohesion at the level of all humanity?
The modern world is organized in Nation States. After the horrors of WWII, leading nations created the United Nations, an attempt at achieving greater worldwide cohesion by agreeing on core principles. On December 10, 1948 a beautiful document was proclaimed, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Seventy-five years later, the UN is an obvious failure and humanity again seems to be marching towards world war. Coherent pluralism at the level of countries remains beyond our reach.
Within countries, we self-organize into tribes. This was comprehensively described by Peter Limberg and Conor Barnes in their article The Memetic Tribes Of Culture War 2.0. For the record, I am not opposed to tribalism because we need identities. We need widely diverse tribes so that everyone can have a sense of belonging. Personally, I self-identify as belonging to a tribe of Metamodern Wannabes.
What I seek to avoid is tribal warfare, culture wars. These have intensified in recent years to a degree that is destabilizing countries and the unthinkable is again thinkable. Both California and Texas were once independent states. Now some credible people question whether they can continue to cohere as one country within the United States.
Currently we see unhealthy coherence within tribes, achieved by defining identities by the other tribes they oppose. We are far from the live and let live libertarian philosophy. How do we achieve cohesion at the level of tribes?
Recently I left an online group that had failed to achieve coherence. This is now the level at which I want to focus my attention. I would like to belong to a group that has a strong sense of coherence. And I would like for this group to have a sense of coherence with other groups in the Metamodern Wannabes tribe. And I would like this sense of coherence to be global.
How do we achieve cohesion at the level of a group within a tribe?
In the last few I have become increasingly aware that every human being is unique. Achieving coherence in a group is not as easy as I once thought it would be. Elevating the individual above the group leads to fragmentation. Subordinating the individual within the group seems unhealthy. An approach which somehow honors BOTH the sovereignty of the individual AND the collective nature of the group seems to be the right direction.
But there are many more pieces to the puzzle of Coherent Pluralism.