Erik Engdahl's application for a ticket to the TEDxUppsalaUniversity event on 21 September 2013

(Version of 5 September 2013,
slightly revised on 30 September)

Formalities of the application:
Category of application: Undergraduate students (30 seats), master students (26 seats), professionals (20 seats), PhD:s and researchers (12 seats), lecturers and professors (12 seats)
I am professional.

Active in the Uppsala region or not.
I work in the Uppsala region.

Have you been to a TED or TEDx event before?
I have not.

Have you talked at a TED or TEDx event before?
I have not.

Why I want to attend the TEDxUppsalaUniversity event:
I would like to attend the TEDxUppsalaUniversity event as I think I have an important contribution in "pipeline" to sustainability. Attending the event will give me one more valuable impulse to let the world know about my contribution.

I was not sure about which of the categories I ought to choose among the "radio buttons". At the end of the 80ies, I got a Techn.Dr. degree in quantum chemistry. Since then I have done many different things in research and education. One of them is that I have, as independent scholar, developed a method - named "dedogmatisation" (See below!) - to work on theories about human action in a broad sense, e.g. in social, behavioral and educational sciences and neuropsychiatry.

The last few years, I have taken a couple of student driven courses at Uppsala Centre for Sustainable Development (CEMUS), among them the course "Actors and Strategies for Change – Towards Global Sustainabilities" where my project group investigated the prerequisite for introducing democracy in Egypt.

In his book "Prosperity without growth", Tim Jackson argues that decoupling between economic growth and the use of limited natural resources/emission of carbon dioxide is an unlikely scenario.

I largely agree with Jackson's conclusion. However, I claim that a kind of decoupling is indeed possible. We are still living in the prehistory of man in which almost every adult person is entangled in an eternal satisfaction-of-needs pursuit. It is eternal as it never leads to a state of internal peace. This pursuit could be seen as responsible for unsustainable depletion of natural resourses, emission of carbon dioxide and overleaping the planetary boundaries.

I think about another kind of decoupling. A decoupling which I consider to be more relevant and more purposive, namely decoupling between the satisfaction of a need/resolution of a problem and the return to a state of internal peace.

This would open up the possibility to look for the satisfaction/solution with CURIOUSITY as driving force rather than untrustfully being persistently reminded of the unsatisfied need/unsolved problem. Looking for and finding a solution without harmful side-effects would become a real possibility.

Is this possible? Yes, it is indeed! Almost every newborn baby is born with a trust which is qualitatively complete though quantitatively minute.

When the young child gets a problem, it would need a "nothing-doing" empathic trust environment from parents or other nursing persons in order to be able to keep its qualitatively complete trust by affirmatively receiving the pains of life. By such affirmations, the quantity of the trust will step by step increase while the trust keeps its complete qualitaty.

However, this original wisdom is more or less put into oblivion in early childhood by acquiring a prejudice as a "necessary" ingenious mean of survival the oppression which characterises childhood in our current prehistory of man. The most important part of the oppression stems from the fact that the adult persons around the child fail to provide a good enough trust environment as they are themselves afraid of the pains of life.

The theoretical framework I propose, e.g. for my version of decoupling, I name "dedogmatisation", the method I mentioned in the second paragraph above.

Dedogmatisation is like intellectual aikido where one identifies the prejudice which one must acquire in order to behave in the stiff-legged way that the theory predicts. Harmless actions requires continous flexible judgement rather than fixed pre-judgement. Harmless actions are unpredictable and cannot be described by a theory.

When dedogmatisation is applied on an ideology prescribing various actions its harmful parasites, like fighting the Evil (the emergency signal of the life) and the "enemy", are eliminated.

Within a few years, I intend to start on my second graduate studies as a platform for acquiring the authority to introduce my dedogmatisation method.

In the above mentioned research fields there are a great deal of "fetischism of methodology", i.e. that research should be done according to an already established method. Therefore authority is indeed needed for the introduction of the method in the research.

Here are links to three of the pages on my website:

Self-presentation
http://www.erikengdahl.se/presentations/pres1-en.html

A somewhat more detailed presentation of dedogmatisation
http://www.erikengdahl.se/dedog/dedog1-en.html

I have been interviewed about dedogmatisation
http://www.erikengdahl.se/dedog/unn-intervjuar-erik1-en.html

The applicant has been selected by the TEDxUppsalaUniversity team to belong the audience of one hundred persons.

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