Above
Power, abstraction and the growing distance between decisions and lived reality.
Free Nine Realms Institute training
The Gap
Above. Within. Between. Fourteen parts about the growing distance between power and ordinary life, the person we perform and the one underneath, and a culture in which everybody can reach everybody while fewer people feel properly known.
Why this exists
We have become very good at being connected to things and surprisingly poor at being in contact.
We tend to name the symptoms separately: distrust, loneliness, polarisation, anxiety, social media, institutional distance. That is understandable. It may also hide the fact that several of these things are feeding the same gap.
There is the distance above us, between systems making decisions and the people living with the consequences. There is the distance within us, between the identity we present and the person who has to live behind it. Then there is the distance between us, where communication has multiplied faster than contact.
The training grew out of the Strangers books, but the questions are not merely political or cultural. They get into identity, belonging, relationships and the way a person learns to exist in front of an audience.
Inside the training
Three gaps. One rather human problem.
The fourteen parts move through three kinds of distance that keep interfering with each other.
Within
The performed self, the adapted self and the awkward question of what remains when nobody is watching.
Between
Belonging, tribes, feeds, networks and the slower skills involved in actual human contact.
Becoming more real
The answer cannot simply be to perform sanity more convincingly inside a disconnected system.
At some point the useful question is how much contact with reality, yourself and other people can be restored without pretending the modern world is about to become simple.
Start the training
The complete fourteen-part training is free.
Take it slowly. Some of the questions are social. Some are personal. Most refuse to stay politely in one category.
You do not need to agree with every diagnosis. The point is to notice where distance has become normal enough that you stopped calling it distance.
Above · Within · Between
Some gaps need crossing. Others need noticing first.
Start by becoming a little harder to separate from reality, from yourself and from the person standing in front of you.