In Episode 96, I interview TEDx speaker, educator, coach, and entrepreneur Paloma Medina. I first met Paloma when I took her masterclass The Neuroscience of Equity and Inclusion in Portland several years ago, and I was immediately impressed with her commitment to science while exploring this difficult and important topic, as well as her ability to frame potentially shame-triggering topics in highly accessible ways. I’ve since trained under Paloma several more times and have wanted to have her on the podcast for a long time.
This conversation went in directions that I wasn’t expecting and was all the more fascinating as a result. I know I’m starting to say this a lot, but I found this interview so inspiring and insightful, and it has had a profound impact on my thinking ever since.
The most impactful concept from the conversation was the realization that my system has been completely colonized by a monocultural way of thinking. This phenomenon, like so much of my cultural conditioning, just felt like “reality” and was therefore functionally invisible to me until Paloma pointed it out. As a result, I, like so many others, have been looking at the world as a kind of zero-sum game, as if there is only one “right” or “best” way to do things and everything else is “shameful”. And a key part of this mindset is the idea that we need to convert everyone to that one “right” way, to bring everyone to our side, recruiting for the monoculture. Even in the interview itself, I started to notice my brain defaulting to this way of thinking.
Meanwhile, as Paloma notes in the interview, many indigenous cultures have been holding a more pluralistic approach in which there are many different ways to be and different things to value, and it’s more about finding your small niche community and letting others do their own thing. Paloma suggests that this cultural plurality is how physiologically modern humans actually existed for around 300,000 years before monocultural thinking began to take over in the last 10,000 years (note: in the interview, Paloma says “3 million years” a few times, but she meant 300,000 years).
Another important point that Paloma discusses, also looking at this long and stable period of pre-modern pluralistic culture, is that human lives were not human-centered or ego-centric in the way that they are now. Pre-modern humans lived in an eco-centric way, viewing nature and other animals as equal “persons” who were essentially just their own small niche communities that everyone had to coexist with as well. Given that humanity can’t convert nature and most animals into a monoculture without destroying them, this eco-centric worldview seems like an essential component of pluralistic cultural thinking.
This pluralistic eco-centric way of thinking strikes me as having much more utility than zero-sum monocultural missionary thinking in terms of both human well-being and environmental health, which are of course ultimately more interconnected than we often like to admit. And yet I can see how monocultural human-centric thinking lives in me in such a powerful way, and I’ve been contributing to it in many unconscious ways, which brings up a lot of grief. I can see now how I’m often trying to convert people to my way of thinking and being, convert people to my values and strategies (this podcast being a prime example). I think a big part of this urge is from the shame I feel when I’m not aligned with my in-group, so I try to convince everyone to join me so I can feel safe about embracing the culture that I think works best for me. In this way, I feel very humbled by Paloma’s perspective and I’m excited to dig in further!
If you’re interested in learning more about Paloma’s work and potentially connecting with her, you can check out her website here.
Note: this interview was edited for clarity.
