Peter Limberg joins us to host the September 19 Design with Dialogue with a conversation and workshop about Wisdom, Status, and Power literacy. Peter writes about the meaning of contemporary and postmodern culture in a range of punchy pieces on his Substack Less Foolish, and in previous work on Medium and Youtube. As the curator of DwD, I find it a synchronistic and culturally meaningful trend with Peter’s Stoa community, the DwD community of practice at OCAD U, and several other dialogue spaces have emerged over the last decade. While The Stoa is and was primarily an online and “placeless” space, DwD aims to be radically present and convivial, with as much openness as tolerable among the wide variety of thoughtful participants.
In this session Peter will present ideas and themes of the process of finding wisdom, and its relevance to the social forces of power-seeking and status. Peter will facilitate exercises to yield insights into our social construction of power and status meanings. We will explore the drive toward wisdom-seeking instead, and assess how we are programmed in our society to seek status and power as personal goods. This session will explore the nature of status and reveal the relationship to personal power and authenticity.
Peter writes that there are many ways to pursue power, and that our lack of understanding of power has many seeking status instead, as a cheap and accessible substitute. He has written or hosted Stoa sessions on these ideas, as a kind of conceptual agenda developed over years. For the DwD workshop we are able to suggest several recent posts:
Status or Power or Wisdom or …
A Less Power Literacy
Wise as Serpents
Video sessions from The Stoa reveal earlier discussions leading to this dialogue.
Igor Grossman’s presentation at The Stoa called Demystifying Wisdom is a good 101 on the topic.
Also at the Stoa Robin Hanson (Elephant and the Brain) asks Keith Johnston a question
To participate, attend Sept 19 at 6:30 pm at OCADU’s Lambert Lounge (room 187) and read at least the recent Substack article, and bring a notepad and pen for the exercises. Register on Eventbrite for this workshop.
About the Host
Peter Limberg stewards an in-person and online “community” you may know called The Stoa. Residing in Toronto, Canada, he currently writes for the Less Foolish Substack and is an occasional philosophical guide. With the Stoa Peter has hosted conversations with (literally) dozens of leading philosophers and thinkers, and is hosting a DwD for the first time in September.