> a story of posture, curiosity, and courage
I’ve been thinking a great deal about humility —though, not quite in the way it's usually understood. See Words in Context.
> But what is radical humility, really?
To me, **radical humility** lives as a kind of paradox. It holds within it a dual nature: the humble and the radical—a yin and yang. On one side, it is soft, open, respectful. On the other, it is bold, disruptive, and unapologetically challenging. One side calms the room; the other dares to disturb it. Together, they create a tension—a productive, almost luminous tension. Like an oxymoron you can walk inside.
Humility, in this radical sense, describes a posture—an attitude towards the world, towards the other, whether that’s a person, a community, a feeling, or even a discomfort in ourselves. This posture is not aggressive. It doesn’t posture to dominate, nor argue to win. It does not come full of certainty. Rather, it approaches with curiosity. It assumes its own limitations. It actively seeks what it does not yet know or fully understand. And to do that properly requires listening—not merely to what is being said but to what is behind the words, what is felt, what is unsaid.
In this mode, you place yourself lower—not in servitude, but out of respect, out of eagerness to learn. It’s a posture of openness—sometimes even cheekiness—like the jester in a medieval court. The jester, after all, might be the only one permitted to speak truth to power. There’s humility in that playfulness, and wisdom in that restraint.
The radical component? That’s the courage. It’s the willingness to raise uncomfortable questions, to risk offence, to cause disruption—not for the sake of it, but because the truth might lie on the far side of discomfort. This form of humility isn’t pleasing or palatable. It’s not about making things easy. In fact, it’s about embracing difficulty. It’s about stepping into uncomfortable, unsettling territory because that’s where new insight waits.
Radical humility demands a lot. It asks us to create spaces where other people can be heard in their strongest form—even when we might deeply disagree. That’s where a practice called "steel-manning" comes in. Steel-manning means trying to articulate someone else’s argument as clearly, strongly, and truthfully as possible—often better than they themselves can manage.
This isn't easy. It pushes us to use someone else’s words, to inhabit their reasoning, even if for a while. In its purest form, it also asks us to speak to their emotional experience: to say not just what they think, but how they feel. And—just as importantly—to be open to hearing that we’ve misunderstood entirely. That takes vulnerability. That takes a radical kind of humility.
Most of us get it wrong many times. That's actually part of the point. It teaches us that understanding is hard. It reveals blind spots we didn’t know we had and uncovers emotional dimensions we might completely miss. You might be intellectually sharp, well-read, eloquent—and yet utterly incapable of understanding the deeper emotional currents in the room. Radical humility brings those failures to light, not to shame us, but to help us grow.
Now, this form of humility has a twin shadow: arrogance. But here, even that word isn't used conventionally. Arrogance, in this context, is a kind of technical term. It isn’t always bad. It can show up as confidence, assertion, clarity of perspective. Sometimes it's needed. But too much, or too rigid, and it shuts the door on learning. The balance lies in being clear and confident where appropriate, but willing to yield, to question, and to let the other in.
Radical humility, then, is really about curiosity. It’s a way of approaching the unknown—whether that’s another person’s value system or your own faulty frame of reference—with genuine interest and care. You may ultimately reject what you’ve explored. But you must explore it first, on its own terms and in its best light.
That’s what this word means here. That’s the spirit in which it's used across this project and this website.
It’s worth saying that the phrase “radical humility” didn't originate with me. It came from Robbie Stamp, someone who spoke of it often, and who—so I’ve heard—is even exploring it in the form of a book. His use of the term struck a deep chord with me. I'm not trying to speak for everyone or to cast a universal definition. Instead, I'm giving voice to my experience with it—what it means within this collaborative, intellectual, and poetic space. And I hope, in time, to explore it further—ideally in dialogue with others. Because it’s in that exchange that new understanding becomes possible.
And that, at its heart, is **radical humility**.