What is a Good Life? #17 - Leaving Utopia with Bayo Akomolafe

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May 9, 2023

Bayo Akomolafe, a celebrated speaker and posthumanist thinker, discusses his transformative journey through parenting a son with autism. He challenges the pursuit of idealized utopias, advocating for embracing complexity, bewilderment, and emotional authenticity. The conversation highlights the nuances of identity, the chaos within societal norms, and the importance of recognizing interconnectedness. Bayo emphasizes cultivating wonder as a means to tackle global challenges, urging listeners to appreciate life's fluidity and the richness of human experiences.

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ANECDOTE

Heaven and its Discontents

Bayo Akomolafe's childhood fascination with heaven led him to question its nature, including the existence of pain and pleasure.
This inquiry eventually led him to abandon Christianity and embrace open-endedness.

INSIGHT

Heaven as Nightmare

Bayo Akomolafe now views heaven as a nightmare due to its closed and finite nature.
He finds the idea of finality terrifying and prefers open-endedness and continuous flow.

ANECDOTE

Omelas and Utopia

Bayo Akomolafe recounts Ursula Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," a story about a perfect city built on a child's suffering.
The story highlights the problematic nature of utopian finality and the appeal of the unknown.

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On the 17th episode of the What is a Good Life? podcast I am joined by Bayo Akomolafe, who is a widely celebrated international speaker, posthumanist thinker, poet, professor, public intellectual, essayist, and author.

Bayo is the Founder of The Emergence Network, he currently lectures at Pacifica Graduate Institute, California, and the University of Vermont, and was appointed the inaugural Global Senior Fellow of the University of California’s (Berkeley) Othering and Belonging Institute. He has also been appointed Senior Fellow for The New Institute in Hamburg, Germany.

In this episode, Bayo shares with us his journey of moving beyond the confines of final statements, final destinations, and boundaries, to an ongoing emergence, or flow. This conversation delves into the abstract, the philosophical, and the practical, as well as Bayo’s personal experiences of what his son with Autism is teaching him about wisdom.

We discuss the importance of cultivating bewilderment, wonder and inquiry, and disrupting the logic of continuity, for new ideas and solutions to emerge - to break the cycle of problems and solutions feeding each other. This episode will challenge your thinking and perhaps inspire you to new ways of problem solving and understanding, while it may also require you to listen with more than your ears and your mind.

Subscribe for weekly episodes, every Tuesday, and check out my YouTube channel (link below) for daily clips and reflections.

Running Order:

01:44 Podcast begins

02:42 Is there pain in Heaven?

05:12 Is there another colour?

08:02 A problem with a "perfect" city

12:44 Creating the space for observing the emergent

17:13 The role of the monster / questioning stability

21:36 Holding fixed views when everything is in flux

23:29 There isn’t an originary point to return to

31:44 His son becomes his teacher and coach

40:14 Shifting perspectives to navigate the world

42:59 Communicating from a different dimension of thought

45:39 Rejecting walls

49:17 What’s more than a solution?

55:04 What’s required beyond information?

59:09 What is a good life for Bayo?

For further content and information check out the following:

- For the podcast's YouTube page: https://www.youtube.com/@whatisagoodlife/videos

- My newsletter: https://www.whatisagood.life/

- My LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-mccartney-14b0161b4/

- Bayo's Website: https://www.emergencenetwork.org/

- Bayo's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bayoakomolafe/