Inhabit: Your Humility

Corey and Ryan discuss the importance of cultivating and inhabiting a “confident humility” with relation to our own physical bodies, mental processes, and spiritual health. We also have a fun segment at the end designed to put your own humility to the test by looking at 10 common integral caricatures — stereotypes that many of us fall into at one point or another during our Integral lives.

There is a phenomenon that has become fairly well known in recent years known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. If you are not familiar with that term, it describes the fact that, on average, people tend to greatly overestimate their own capacities and competences. In other words, the majority of us are completely out of our depths when it comes to some important aspect of our lives — our work, our skills, our overall sense-making and maps of reality, etc. — and we surround ourselves with any number of cognitive biases that prevent us from seeing just how limited our views and our self-concepts truly are. In other words, “the first rule of the Dunning-Kruger club is you don’t know you’re in the Dunning-Kruger club.”

It’s one of the well-known traps of Integral — because it is so comprehensive and includes so much of our inner and outer worlds, it can tempt us into thinking we know… well, everything.

What’s worse, if we don’t keep a careful eye on our ego, it doesn’t take too long before we’ve wrapped an entire identity around our epistemic over-certainty, which only leads to further social fragmentation, tribalism, and culture wars — even within the integral space itself.

Because make no mistake, this phenomenon is not describing “dumb people” or people who are “less developed” than yourself. It also describes doctors, PhDs, philosophers, artists, and many of the greatest minds of our time, regardless of where they are in their own growth and development. The sorts of cognitive biases that produce the Dunning-Kruger effect are legion, and made all the more ubiquitous by social media and all the various selection pressures that come with it.

So if you are able to take a moment to pause and reflect on where you might be on the Dunning-Kruger path — congratulations! You are practicing healthy epistemic humility right now at this very moment.

So how do we prevent ourselves from falling into the trap of over-certainty? By committing to the ongoing work of growing up, cleaning up, and waking up within our own interiors, and then bringing more flexibility, curiosity, and multi-perspectival awareness to our epistemic maps of reality. In other words: cultivating our interior confidence, and then aligning that with humility when it comes to how we navigate the world around us.