There has certainly been a lot of information, and evidence, pointing to the very dark and gloomy future we have as a species, as a community of animals, as a habitat.
So I appreciate coming across fresh ideas. Daniel Schmachtenberger supplies that in a short video I stumbled across recently.
I was so taken with the eloquence of his expression, I’ve watched a few times and now taken some notes on the highlights. Enjoy!
“We’re operating the same way that has always led to war and environmental destruction and collapse of civilization… So when you start to think about exponential rivalry – rivalrous dynamics that lead to polarization that ends up leading to war…
The underlying dynamics… are not different in kind than the ones that we’ve been facing since the beginning of civilization. They are different in magnitude and speed…
The leap we need to make in terms of how we operate…
The paradigm shift is [for] everything. We need new systems of governance… [as] getting lots of humans to agree on things, we suck at it…. We can’t get everyone to agree… beyond the level of having a conversation together…. Someone puts forward a proposition based on their own limited sense-making – and because that sense-making was not informed with wider sense-making, will always in the process of benefitting, will damage something else …. You just created polarization.
We need new systems of governance that are not any system of governance that the world has ever done so far. They are systems of how do we individually and collectively make sense of what’s going on, make sense of what we actually value and how those values can be synergistically satisfied, rather in a series of trade-offs with each other and how do we create design that are optimal synergestic satisfiers.
We need totally new systems of economics, we need totally new systems of education, health care, all the way down to, at an individual level, a new bases for identity, values, our own individual sense-making, choice making.
As long as I think I am an individual, that is fundamentally separate from you, and the biosphere and everything else, I can think about optimizing my own quality of life independent of, or maybe even at the expense of your quality of life, or the biosphere or anything else.
As soon as I get that and I start to say “I’m not that tree, but where would I be without trees? Well I would not exist. There would be no atmosphere if there weren’t plants… so I’m fundamentally not even a meaningful concept without plant. So If think of myself as me, that is not fundamentally interdependent with plants, I’m not even thinking clearly…
Then I start to run that, what about soil… it turns out my life depends on the whole thing. So I can be better thought of as an emergent property of this whole thing, not just the biosphere because where would it be without the sun.
As long as f I have a sense of I that is separate and maybe even rivalrous, in competition for some scarce status, resource, attention, partner, then we have a fundamental basis for war in a world of exponential increasing technology, which means the war gets to be more and more consequential, that will self-terminate.
So, we either figure out anti-rivalry or go extinct. That’s the core thing. Figuring out anti-rivalry is a psycho spiritual process inside of ourselves – can we even get along with our family members. Can we even pay attention to our emotions and triggers that highjack us from sovereignty because the moment I am getting pissed and my value system is not to be an angry person, I’m highjacked.
Can I pay attention to that and actually have some sovereignty over my own inner state and how I show up in the world. And can we figure out how to do that collectively as well?”