Toward the Turning: Identity, Groundlessness, and Roots of Group Conflict

Welcome to the Existential-Humanistic Northwest September 2026 Lunch & Learn

Toward the Turning: Groundlessness, and Roots of Group Conflict

September 11, 2026 1:00 PM - 2:30 PM Online only

What if the deepest engine of group conflict is not fanaticism or tribalism, but a mistake in how we see ourselves and our “worlds”?

Falling on the 25th anniversary of 9/11 and in the year of America’s 250th anniversary, Scott Gibbs draws from his new book,Toward the Turning: Rethinking the Meaning of 9/11, the Clash of Civilizations, and a Postmodern World, in a quest to find the deeper source of group conflict. Using 9/11 and the “War on Terror” as a touchstone, examined through an existential lens, he will explore the dynamics of identity—national, religious, political—and identification, and discuss how our sense of self narrows, hardens, and intensifies, particularly under threat, and how we try to make our “worlds” follow suit; how groups become locked in self-reinforcing “deadly dances” feeding off and into these self and social extremes; and how these dynamics ultimately rest on a misapprehension.

The talk invites participants to consider what becomes possible when “who we are” and our corresponding “worlds” are understood not as fixed and given, but as lived, constructed, and vulnerable. Said differently, what becomes possible when groundlessness is met and accepted rather than denied, cast as a problem, or even pathologized? The presentation offers an existential-humanistic way of seeing group tension differently and makes a case for openness to and tolerance of groundlessness as the path to greater collective tolerance. Twenty-five years after 9/11, and in a country—indeed, a world—deeply divided, that case is as urgent as ever.

About the Facilitator

Scott Gibbs is a psychotherapist in private practice, working in the existential-humanistic and psychodynamic traditions, and serves on the board of the Existential-Humanistic Institute. His earlier article, published in theJournal of Humanistic Psychology, trained an existential lens on Islamism and Islamic thought more broadly, and laid the groundwork for his bookToward the Turning. Before becoming a clinician, he spent years working in private equity. He holds degrees from Princeton and Northwestern, and writes "The Existential Moment," a monthly column on applied existential thought.