In 1957 a deceptively simple psycho-social formulation from an outsider psychiatrist took root in popular culture. A book was published by the same name. I’m OK. You’re OK.
Between its publication and popular embrace, researchers expanded on its relational landscape, totally human-relationship-centric like so much before it in modern perspectives. I’m OK. You’re OK led to practices broadly referred to as transactional analysis. Its formulation can be traced to a complex array of relational strategies common today. It’s not a stretch to call it the e=mc² of modern psycho-social phenomena. Through related forms of… relating… researchers went on to validate a multitude of methods over more than half a century, leading in part to the now burgeoning field of cognitive sciences and the relative newcomer behavioral economics.
Early on, through books by titles like Games People Play (1964) and Scripts People Live (1975), transactional analysis attested, in a rye psycho-social fashion, that there are inevitable ways people establish OK-ness. Rather than pushback about homogenizing people’s diverse experiences, at the time, it was embraced. This speaks to the perception of psycho-social patterns as itself a powerful insight. There are hierarchies in terms of leadership; there are patterns in seeking and achieving of psycho-social balance.
From this perspective, functioning in a psycho-socially complex role, from social worker to psychologist, diplomat to schoolteacher, would not necessarily, despite the ups and downs of real relationships, resign one to an unfortunate position. Ancient legend Pandora, with her “only hope” and unfortunate box of suffering, begone! Let games and scripts predominate. Whether they be in the background or the foreground, no problem, so as long as options and choices (or the perception of them) are there too.
The real traction in the I’m okay You’re okay formulation then is a subjective driving force: that humans are capacitated – through our relationships with “other” – to recondition ourselves out of difficult pasts. Bootstrap thinking. Fast forward to today, and we face the difficult future humanity seems to be speeding towards, speeds reached in part by capacitating humans so that they might surpass each other (a generalizable measure of success still being okay-ness).
The Science of Representational Reality — with content library available at OKICscience.com — first, questions the inevitability of vacuous okay-ness style relationalism. Then it replies thoroughly and thoughfully to the problem that, from the current state of psych-socio-cultural state of affairs, humanity has not yet arrived at an adequate formulation for its own thriving. The bootstrapping towards I’m okay You’re okay increasingly and ironically carries the weight that, humanity on its relational path might have to resign to a collective death sentence. It’s a timeline, so far, by which the evidence for “relating does not center around humans” includes reactively cycling activities around violent populism, computers destroying the world, climate crisis, fear of alien invasion. On the non-reactive side, we find an inspiring assortment too. Biomimicry, indigenous skill-building including animistic practices, collective intelligence, and computers saving the world.
So if relating does not revolve around individuals and their relative okay-ness, why bother examining or believing in OKIC’s universality of relating? If relating is possible so as to activate new optima of inter-relatedness, it is possible to transform human creative endeavoring through centering and balancing, such that businesses, economies, art, and technology can themselves repair the human dependencies that have come asunder: nature, health, education, innovation?
The trick is, the orientation has to capacitate a shift from okay-centeredness to more broadly defined/available/relatable centering. In this is a counterintuitive condition, like heliocentrism still triggers. Our “I’m whizzing through space rotating in two directions at once around a ball of fire” wtf doubt. Humans can be resilient in the face of disorienting conditions. And even though centering, as broadly construed as OKIC achieves, is unlikely to be perceptible to us as individuals, we can learn to, and be given digital tools, relate to and through it. In OKIC, the word generative is used to refer to the real effects of centering that overcomes disorientation. It stems from adequately addressing the challenge of comprehensive meta-relating.
Relatedness is a characteristic of all things, yet it no more revolves around humans as the sun revolves around the earth. Most early cultures embraced beliefs and practices centered around the view that everything can be related to in some way or another. Broadly, animism.
There’s a wise naivety in animism that can be deconstructed using the metaphor, as the ancient parable of the blind men and the elephant does, of examining the parts of a trained elephant without being able to see the whole. This represents the human predilection to add special meanings to our own curious explorations. A clever enough enterprise until we begin to conflate reductionism with a harmless bunch of quibbling monks.
OKIC looks and feels nothing like an elephant. Moreover, it reveals the elephant metaphor to be quite inadequate. The myth of the unknowable elephant leads to an understanding of animism little different from superstition and of science as hopelessly blind. The wisdom latent in animism, and which OKIC itself brings alive, is that the human concept of “understanding” must contain not only extra-personal comprehension but centered relating if it is to mirror reality, similar to the way nature and co-existence of lifeforms happens.
In the drawing above, the elephant becomes instead an uncharacteristically restrained dragon. With this revised metaphor for modern times, we begin to get a sense of how ancient animism has been hinting all along at representational reality. Its paradox, and thus institutional science’s achilles heal at present, is that the inherent limitations of human inquiry warrant a special type of self-restraint. And hopefully you will begin to appreciate that OKIC is nothing like an elephant.
In timeless relating comes comprehension and with that real solutions to seemingly intractable problems so far thought to be inherent to the human culture machine, like “human nature” is (tautologically) inherent to humans. Including the reductionist, siloed views of reality. On an intimate scale, we need no longer hinge the future on tireless admonitions to others that they not be self-centered. Nor do we need disorient our minds by experimenting with hallucinogens or superstitions that are mumbo-jumbo (to us) in ways that remove us, when we are lucky just temporarily, by huge scales from real and pressing cultural concerns. Conspiracies too graduate from paranoia to patience puzzles.
Humanity will not get to optima of interrelatedness by catering only to our well-meaning impulses for kumbaya relating games, healing our inner child wounds, or “saving” or “waking” us one soul at a time. We will not get there by entire countries simultaneously (as if by magic) shedding their imperialistic ways, such that no one country has any particular advantage. And we will not get there by continuing beyond the stage of reality hypoxia whereby we hold our collective breath for theoretical physics (and now computer science) to build a relating-to-reality black box or superintelligence.
Those are not the problems, and therefore cannot provide direct solutions. The basic misrepresentation about relating – the lack of universal style – is. The human culture machine finds itself now peering down the barrel of serious global disruptions, resigned to an inadequate trifecta of well-meaning non-solutions. This is humanity’s humility moment. Personal humility, and also “the machine”, “the system” type humility, leaving us, it would seem, with no option but to increasingly humiliate ourselves through righteous indignation fueled by equal parts futility and guilt, while seemingly having no possibility for reprieve. Peace-less pieces.
Relating that is limited to humans relating to each other, affecting each other, is a “funhouse” (uncentered) version of relationalism. Its fuel, also a magnifier, is polarities prone to distortions. No one’s experience is the same as anyone else’s, for sure, yet this needs to spur innovation rather than grinding to a halt all progress towards not just reprieve but repair.
We can’t get there by dismissing how humans actually relate in real time. By brushing off difficulties as “human nature”, whatever that means. The patterns point to something altogether more interesting. “Human nature” as an explanatory framework can be replaced by how we integrate meaningfully to our inseparable, timeless dance of co-existence.
Next essay I’m Lost
Whole collection What OKIC has to offer should both puzzle and intrigue you