There is this weird thing that happens when everyone is treated as a commodity. We forget that people are different. People have different desires, strengths, roles, experiences etc. There is reason why someone with 1 year of programming experience is probably not going to make as good a lead engineer as some one with more experience. In integral studies this is related to a notion of levels, which smacks of hierarchy. And there is the danger of thinking this way that leads to atrocities like fascism and dictatorships. However I think this is an important concept to think about and one of the most useful ways to think about this comes from family contellations.

Family constellations is a alternative therapy method that looks at the underlying dynamics in a system to heal it. It also honors ancestors… It is a bit woo. Hanzi actually calls out Family Constellations in this Jim Rutt podcast and places it with UFOs and conspiracy theories… But I think there is something interesting going on here.

In any case, in Family Constellations, there is this notion of weight. Certain people have more weight than others. This does not make them better – it is just a fact. And it is important to honor this weight. If a system does not honor this weight the system is off kilter. An example of this is that your grandfather has more weight than your child. Now your grandfather may be an a**hole. But he has been on the earth longer and has accumulated more weight. Your child may be the buddha reincarnated but your child has less weight.

In some systems we are deciding things based on weight when maybe we should use other decision metrics and this is because we are not honoring the value of weight. Once we make this public we can focus easier on how we need to make decisions in general.