Atlas Summit 2016 at FreedomFest

Culture includes a collective understanding of normality and the use of stereotypes to make sense of people we don’t know. Our western culture has evolved tremendously for the better over the past several hundred years, including dramatic reductions in violence, increases in empathy and compassion, greater use of reason, and higher abstract reasoning intelligence (the Flynn Effect). Our cultural assessment of what is normal orbits about the center of a bell curve. This allows for a sense of common ground, common sense, and shared experience that’s crucial to much of daily interaction and business. The downside, though, is this also provides an illusion of shared collective experience that can alienate those outside of the mainstream into negative stereotypes. Those at the tails of the bell curve can end up excluded or shunned.

Joel Wade will invite you to reflect on these issues and consider that we are each much more complex than a collective understanding can provide. As we continue to grow more conscientious as a cultural trend, we can, as individuals, become more conscious and accepting of what makes us each unique; expanding the moral circle to include a wider range of experience, a more complex sense of individualism, and a more compassionate sense of humanity. The benefits to understanding this for our personal happiness and well being are substantial.