Video Documentary

Attention Videographers!

Got video camera skills? Like to do video editing? Want to be part of a team that can hammer out a documentary feature that tours the world and wins awards and skyrockets your career? Want to be part of a social movement that can bring our shared humanity from the brink of catastrophe, and forge a new and safer and brighter and more peaceful and sane world?

Objective: To make an important documentary about an important subject that has the potential to change the world in a meaningful way.

The PROCESS of a “community of philosophical inquiry” is a fascinating and compelling one for viewers. By process, I refer both to the nature of what goes on inside any given session, as well as the development of the group over multiple and accumulative sessions. These may be inseparable from each other, but are worth noting as distinct, at least from the outset.

In the beginning, any given community of philosophical inquiry (CPI) is at its most random state of order. While some people may know each other, many faces are unfamiliar. The process of social cohesion and community development then takes place both through time, through the mere repetition of familiarity, but more meaningfully, more significantly, more interestingly, through the natural interfaces which occur through exposure to each other’s “inner processes”.

It’s these inner processes—and their development through exposure and exercise in community—that are the real story that only a video documentary can reveal in the objective and scale-invariant way that skillful documentary filmmakers can provide.

The inner processes are of two types: engagement and activity of regurgitating and habituated and conditioned reflexes, beliefs, opinions, often showing up as defensiveness (arms being crossed, eyes rolling, etc) as well as the cyclic and positional opposite of unreasoned and unreasonable advocacy that portrays as zealous and unmitigated interpersonal push and social pressure.

The other type of inner process shows up as consideration, reflection, pause, listening, observation, honor, trust, care, all of which are far more active on the inward front, and appear outwardly as inaction PER SE! Insofar as the inner activity is far more interesting and creative and nuanced and meaningful (where we MEAN our inner process), video documentation of this process is ideally best done through video diaries that individual members are willing to make on their own phone cameras.

The core narrative is unmistakable: Through (philosophical) inquiry, community grows, deepens, strengthens, gains in meaning and value, etc. And through community, inquiry similarly grows, deepens, strengthens, gains in meaning and value. One nourishes the other. One MUST flourish for the other to flourish. The community of inquiry (sans the philosophical part) is what defines science. And the scientific method (where we hypothesize and carefully experiment and verify the results of other people’s experiments) is observably (and single-handedly) responsible for the explosive development and growth of human community throughout the world.

What exists in stark contrast to this phenomena is the suppressive impact—both inwardly and socially—of ideology, belief systems, cultured and indoctrinated ideas, concepts, conclusions and judgments. This mental process of exclusion and denial is anti-social, anti-community, antagonistic toward social welfare and individual well-being. These phenomena represent thought disorders, the likes of which include any and all versions of narcissism, which thrive in the privatized spaces of our ow personal identification systems, left unchecked by trustworthy social interfaces, and are brought to reliable cessation through the rigor of a caring, creative, and critical community of inquiry.

It would be superfluous here, and unnecessarily exhaustive to take comprehensive account of the personal, psychological, emotional and spiritual problems and crises that face persons living on the planet presently. But we can observe alarmingly that these problems are increasing exponentially, and that the conditions engendered by these are not merely worth remediating, but are remedied NECESSARILY. The alternative, which is plainly visible through the crystal ball of an unflinching examination that the nature, causes, and conditions of the present crises will inevitably, invariably, necessarily elaborate toward global catastrophe and destruction on every front of human civilization, from economic to ecologic.

The Community of Philosophical Inquiry offers solution. This very local and organic community of philosophical inquiry, hosted in an ordinary coffee shop, on any main street in any town or community, anywhere in the world is a profound remedy and foreseeably, an institution of any given community, forever. The process can be documented, wrapped neatly into a feature film that then shops through festivals, winning awards, gaining acclaim, changing pedagogical practices in classrooms and policies in boards of education across the country, and instituted as pedagogical bedrock around the world.

Videographers, editors, documentary filmmakers: Your place in history calls your name now.