In this Second Renaissance episode from Life Itself, Rufus Pollock sits down with Bonnitta Roy for part II of their conversation.

Listen above or watch the episode here

About the Episode

In this episode, Bonnitta Roy delves into the challenges of large-scale collective action, the limitations of extrinsic motivation, and the importance of fostering intrinsic motivation and prosocial behavior. Drawing from her own personal experiences and work with the UN, she and Rufus examine the evolution of human cooperation, the role of identity, and the need for new strategies that emphasize inner development for transformative leadership.

They also explore the four key skills taught in the Divinity School—awakened perception, visionary scholarship, crazy wisdom, and passionate action—skills that Bonnitta argues are vital for guiding free and willing participants towards positive change. Their conversation addresses the essential qualities of healthy leadership, voluntary obligation, and effectively managing difficult personalities within conscious communities.

Listen to our first interview with Bonnitta Roy here.

Chapters

00:01:11 Who gets to build the world we live in and the role of investors

00:07:20 Challenges of large-scale collective action and the role of intrinsic motivation

00:12:55 The evolution of human prosociality and cultural factors enabling collective action

00:21:35 The importance of identity, evaluative reasoning, and enforced social protocols

00:37.25 Circles of trust and transcending the Self

00:53:00 The role of trust and voluntary obligation in community building

01:05:00 The need for transformative leadership and toxicity

01:10:02 The four key leadership skills of the Divinity School

About Bonnitta Roy

Bonnitta Roy teaches insight practices for individuals who are developing meta-cognitive skills, and hosts collective insight retreats for groups interested in breaking away from limiting patterns of thought. She teaches a masters course in consciousness studies and transpersonal psychology at the Graduate Institute. Her teaching highlights the embodied, affective and perceptual aspects of the core self, and the non-egoic potentials from which subtle sensing, intuition and insight emerge. Through her company, APP-AI, Bonnitta is developing applications that can visualize changing patterns as teams work through complex problems. Her research shows how simple but powerful protocols that underlie these patterns can be used to represent various dispositional states of human systems. Bonnitta is the author of the popular Medium publication Our Future at Work. She is an associate editor of Integral Review where you can also find her articles on process approaches to consciousness, perception, and metaphysics.

About Rufus Pollock

Rufus Pollock is an entrepreneur, activist and author as well as a long-term zen practitioner. He is passionate about finding wiser, weller ways to live together. He has founded several for-profit and nonprofit initiatives including Life Itself, Open Knowledge Foundation, and Datopian. His book Open Revolution is about making a radically freer and fairer information age. Previously he has been the Mead Fellow in Economics at the University of Cambridge as well as a Shuttleworth and Ashoka Fellow. A recognized global expert on the information society, he has worked with G7 governments, IGOs like the UN, Fortune 500s as well as many civil society organizations. He holds a PhD in Economics and a double first in Mathematics from the University of Cambridge. Find out more about his work on his website: rufuspollock.com.

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