“Our experience as human beings orbits many fundamental pivots. Ordinarily, we are unaware of the foundations upon which our sense of meaning and personhood are founded. Although we have words and concepts ‘about’ them, they are primarily nonverbal.

Lately, in a few conversations, and in private reflection, I have become more aware of their profound influence on our body and mind (these two cannot be distinct, though we can distinguish them). Both of them are doublets, or polar pairs. The first is inclusivity and exclusivity.

This relates to our felt senses of membership, and ‘who belongs’ inside or outside groups with which we interact.

In isolation, a situation familiar to many modern persons, most people will both suffer and establish explanatory narratives related to their situation. This is a state in which the doublet has collapsed in on itself, and the results are often both confusing and painful.

But what I wish to point at here is merely this: our historical relationships and felt senses of inclusion and exclusion (along with conceptual explanations for these experiences or desires) are fundamental to our human experience.

The second is the doublet of ‘promotion for’ and ‘competition against’. Tonight there was an ‘important’ basketball game. I was reminded of the tokenized and somewhat bizarre world of ‘sports’, in which highly trained teams ‘play’ what we call a game, in order to establish supremacy. In Nature, and even in human conception (fertilization of the egg), what can appear as competition against, is often actually promotion for.

As an example, human sperm form a cohort that ‘promotes’ contenders for fertilization. Schools of birds and fish exhibit similar behaviors. Misinterpretations of evolutionary theory have imbued many moderns with wrongminded ideas and justifications related to what we call competition, but the fundamental reality, is that the both sides of this doublet must be understood and maintained in common human thought, experience and relationships.

Within a sports team, we see the nature of promotion for. When two teams meet, what appears to be competition against is more accurately a test of each team’s internal abilities to form a skillfully coherent unity, and promote contenders to goal situations. When I see humans ‘observing’ sports, we see the other doublet: inclusivity (groups that favor a team) and exclusivity (others, especially those that favor an opposing team are considered to be ‘outside’ such groups). Another example is corporations and companies: employees are internal, and thus included, clients and competitors are most often treated and understood as external to differing degrees.

Personally, I would emphasize the aspect of ‘promotion for’ in the second doublet, particularly when we examine the actual relationships and outcomes in animal cohorts and ecologies.

What does the ‘for’ mean in my promotion for model? For the group’s future development, success, and, perhaps, awakening. But in nature, it is ‘for’ the history and future potentials of life on Earth.”

— an anonymous informant