Meet interesting people.

For people in the Fifth World, a long time has passed since people learned to ignore the evidence of their senses. When they listen to bird songs and animal calls, they hear a language that they can learn, understand, and respond in, because no one ever taught them that animals can’t speak. When they see trees competing to reach into the sky and gobble up the light, they recognize a complicated web of friends, enemies, kin, and rivals, because no one ever taught them that plants can’t relate. When they press their hands against a rock, they feel it press back, because no one ever taught them that rocks can’t react. They do not define personhood so narrowly as a specimen of Homo sapiens. Precise criteria for personhood vary, but they always center on the question of relationship. Can you communicate (verbally or not doesn’t matter, since some humans can’t speak, either)? Can you give gifts and receive them? Do you engage in ceremony (however peculiar your ceremonies may seem)? These things make one a person or not. In fact, person might even become a verb, rather than a noun, suggesting something that one might do (or occasionally even not do), rather than an intrinsic quality.

Those who dwell in the Fifth World inhabit a world full of persons. Persons have needs. They want things. They have histories that have shaped them, secrets that they keep (even from themselves), faults and flaws, strengths and virtues, hard-won wisdom, vulnerabilities, things that they know, and lies that they believe. We will meet many people — both human and other-than-human — and we want to get to know them as persons. If what we’ve seen so far makes them seem simple and one-dimensional, then we can feel confident that we haven’t seen everything yet. In a case like that, you can pursue this agenda by digging deeper, spending time with that person, asking questions, staying curious, rejecting simple caricatures, and trying to learn more about the real person underneath. Our characters play the parts of the primary characters in our story, but we must never forget that this just means that we’ve chosen to focus on them right now. All of those secondary characters and other people we meet have their own stories, too, where they play the central parts.

#Principles

All of the principles work together, but each agenda has three in particular that help to advance it. For “Meet interesting people,” we have:

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