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In indigenous societies human scale groups are those who we regularly rely on for mutual aid and assistance. In small societies without abstract formal authorities, everyone learns from everyone. The relational complexity of life, and the effects of the current de-humanising economic paradigm can’t easily be condensed into words. Instead, a visual language provides more possibilities for conveying the nuances and context of specific constellations in succinct diagrams.

The relational complexity of life can’t easily be condensed into words. Instead a visual language provides more possibilities for describing the nuances and the context of specific constellations in succinct diagrams.

Relationships

Each of our relationships is a feedback loop that is visualised as a circle.

The relative importance / intimacy of our relationships is visualised in terms of the relative size differences between circles. The extent to which two relationships are based on compatible interests and sensitivities is visualised in terms of the level of overlap between circles.

Households

We use red circles to denote the relationships with the humans and other living beings in the household in which we live.

If we live in a one-person household, our map does not contain any red circles.

Extended family / whānau

We use orange circles to denote our relationships with the humans and living beings in our extended family / whānau.

Beyond the household, In indigenous societies human scale families / whānau are those who we regularly rely on for mutual aid and assistance to survive and thrive. In Māori culture the whānau is the smallest viable economic unit rather than the household. Evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson describes such small ‘human scale’ groups as the primary organisms in human societies – as opposed to individuals or households / nuclear families.

For this reason we visually denote the scope of extended family / whānau in terms of orange coloured background.

Relationships beyond family / whānau

We use green circles to denote our relationships with humans and living beings beyond our extended family / whānau.

Prior to the modern era, all our relationships with humans and living beings beyond our extended family / whānau would be limited to those who we regularly encounter in the bioregion in which we live.

Emergence and evolution of culture and values

With the help of written language, WEIRD societies and powered-up empires emphasise and formalised a top-down perspective on the propagation of cultural practices and values. With the context of empires, education is no longer primarily about omni-directional learning at human scale, but it degrades into various forms of uni-directional indoctrination, administered by those in formal positions of “authority”.

In small human scale societies without abstract formal authorities, everyone learns from everyone, primarily by observation, imitation, and asking for assistance. For small children in human scale societies the household and extended family provide a rich environment for omni-directional learning.

As older children grow into adult responsibilities, they also become introduced to people beyond their family, and thereby expand scope of their relationships to a bioregional scale.

So-called values are useful abstractions and relative preferences that emerge from our relationships and from immersive omni-directional learning at human scale.

We ‘relate’ to these abstractions and preferences, and we regularly reflect on their relative importance when we encounter cognitive dissonance in one or more of our relationships.

As needed we refine or reconfigure our values and/or some of our relationships with humans and other living beings to minimise cognitive dissonance, and maintain a healthy ecology of care.

We do not arrive at values and preferences in isolation, but within our dynamically evolving social context. Values are best understood as a second order cultural process, the derivative that emerges from our attempts of minimising cognitive dissonance across all our relationships.

The “self” is a WEIRD cultural artefact that denotes the “sovereign” individual, an abstraction, which according to neocolonial / neoliberal dogma, we should value above all else. It is much healthier to understand the self in terms of our deeply held values, which are the product of our lived experience in the ecology of care that we are embedded in – which may or may not be in a healthy state.

In a healthy ecology of care our values may be closely aligned with the values of those with engage with on a daily basis. In an unhealthy ecology of care, our values will be shaped by the cognitive dissonance and the harm we are exposed to. Some of our values may then be consciously chosen in opposition to harmful experiences we have had to endure. If our ecology of care remains unhealthy, our values may eventually compel us to develop healthier relationships in a different social environment.

WEIRD education is focused on turning playful and curious children into self-conscious individuals in a competitive world. Most of WEIRD psychology is concerned about developing a healthy “self” that is prepared to engage in the WEIRD game of “earning a living”, in competition with other self-conscious individuals. Increasingly WEIRD medicine is about treating the long-term effects of the chronic stress experienced by self-conscious individuals who are no longer embedded in a healthy ecology of care.

To understand the diagrams in the next section, please remember that the visual language used represents relationships (not individuals) as circles, and that every human in an ecology of care has their own unique lived experiences, including their own feelings and mental models of the state of health of the various relationships within their ecology of care.

Diagnosing diseases in our ecology of care

The loneliness epidemic in WEIRD societies is a direct result of the misguided educational ambition of creating independent individuals. The immediate effect is that many young adults lose contact with their family / whānau. The effect is amplified by an economic paradigm that focuses on the household / nuclear family as the main economic unit. WEIRD societies have replaced the useful capability of critical / independent thought with an emphasis on so-called economic independence.

Loneliness

The absence of supportive family is the ideal precondition for instilling the level of fear in young adults that is needed to coerce everyone to join the cult of busyness and climb the ladder of “success”, to earn an “independent” living, which ironically heavily depends on complete submission to abstract institutions in far away places that are blind to the nuances of local social contexts.

In principle, some digital technologies can be used to develop virtual human scale ecologies of care, but corporate controlled social media technologies are designed to serve the interests of capital. Entrapping people in addictive competitive social games is the exact opposite of catalysing healthy ecologies of care.

Loneliness is not an individual problem. It is an unavoidable cultural problem generated by a misguided, life destroying economic ideology.

Unhealthy relationships

The bizarre cultural notion of “independence” and the pressure on everyone to “earn” a living easily leads to strained relationships and value conflicts within households, affecting the relationships between parents and children and the relationships between intimate partners.

Unhealthy families

Families with too few outside relationships don’t have to feel unhealthy, but they may easily run into difficulties when overwhelmed by emergencies such as natural disasters, which may require assistance and skills that are not readily available locally. Isolated families are also at risk of developing toxic social power dynamics that do feel unhealthy, from which there is no escape route since no one has access to trusted external relationships that could be relied upon.

A common unhealthy scenario involves isolated households that are not embedded in a supportive extended family / whānau that can be relied upon for mutual aid. The lack of extended family support pushes households into unhealthy levels of dependencies on powered-up super-human scale institutions, and it makes individuals highly vulnerable to economic exploitation by corporations.

Social diseases at human scale

The above scenarios illustrate broad categories of social diseases at human scale. The same visual language can be used to map out and communicate concrete social constellations in a way that shifts the focus away from pathologising or blaming individuals towards a relational and ecological perspective at the level of communities and families.

Including values in visual relationship maps, and encouraging all family members to draw a visual relationship map from their unique perspective, can help catalyse greater levels of shared understanding, appreciation of nuance and complexity, draw attention towards toxic factors in the institutional landscape, and highlight the limits and the potential for harm of self-centred therapies.

Social diseases beyond human scale

The actual effect of the myth of meritocracy, which is used to normalise and rationalise head to head competition, is a consistent bias to over-represent capabilities, and to actively avoid thinking about externalities. This is familiar to anyone who has ever been exposed to advertising, which is deployed systematically, at global scale. The cult of busyness undermines attempts at creating a shared understanding at a very basic level. The collective effects at scale and over decades are disastrous. Using a suitable diagrammatic language, they can be visualised in terms of life destroying feedback loops between super-human scale institutions and human scale groups.

Awareness of the paralysed state of normality is experienced as hyper-normality, an extreme state of cognitive dissonance, where all of human life has morphed into a competitive social game of pretend play, where the pretense of technological and social progress has become the main objective of the game.

Slow, small, and local is beautiful

The dynamic process of life is a fractal web/cycle of feedback loops that uses the energy of the sun to play creatively with the second law of thermodynamics. By burning through fossil fuels a million times faster than it took for carbon to be sequestered by biological and geological processes, industrialised societies have created an uncontained ecological disaster that is changing the biosphere at a rate that far exceeds the rate at which complex life forms (including mammals and humans) are able to evolve and adapt. This civilisation is finished.

There are many creative ways for navigating the unavoidable process of unWEIRDing industrialisation. We can only reactivate the reservoir of human imagination by fully re-humanising all neurodivergent and otherwise marginalised people who operate outside the industrialised paradigm. On the journey of unWEIRDing and simplifying, permaculture pioneer David Holmgren recommends scavenging as a pragmatic cultural practice in the coming decades.

The example of unWEIRDing below relates to the production of chairs:

1. Automated mass production: keeping people busy with consumption of short lived, mass produced goods shipped from far away places
2. Carpentry with a few power tools: paying attention to detail, crafting goods that will last a lifetime and longer
3. Manual carpentry: simplifying the design, and reducing non-local resource use by eliminating spurious complexity

Crafts practiced without modern power tools in a local context are practiced within a relational ecology of care, outside the industrialised economic paradigm. The commentary of the crafts person is revealing:

I made this chair for my mother’s birthday since she likes sitting on the floor. I made her a tatami chair. If you’re thinking about building one yourself, it’s relatively easy if you have enough time!

This is a great example of how a relational ecology of care and gifts enhances human wellbeing, without any reliance on highly energy and resource intensive tools.

Crafts practiced with the help of modern power tools allow us to produce high quality bespoke goods that would take much longer to produce without modern technologies, which are impossible produce using techniques of mass production. The resulting quality is appreciated by discerning customers, even within the paradigm of advanced industrial automation. This is a first step of unWEIRDing, which reintroduces a relationship of mutual appreciation between crafts person and buyer.

Mass produced goods, which are a defining characteristic of industrialisation, replace large parts of the relational fabric of human societies with anonymous transactions. We should not be surprised that we experiences the results in terms of social diseases.

Appreciating the cyclical nature of all life

All living organisms are equipped with embodied capabilities for reproduction. This allows species to proliferate and enage in collaborative niche construction. But as least as important, all living organisms are fully compostable – the process of life eventually composts and decomposes all living organisms into the building blocks for new forms of life.

The organisms of each species have evolved to occupy a particular niche in space and time, including the species specific average lifespan – the time between being conceived and being composted into basic building blocks for new life. In a very literal sense living organisms give rise to conditions conducive to life, as part of the virtuous fractal system of feedback loops that includes all living beings. Death is as much part of the wonder of life as is birth.

A culture that denies death or that attempts to indefinitely delay the unavoidable death of individual human organisms is a life denying, highly anthropocentric, and ultimately self-destructive culture.

Firstly, small human scale groups rather than individuals are the primary organisms of human societies. Unless the individual process of dying is an integral part of the ecology of care of a human scale cultural organism, individuals feel disconnected from life, including disconnected from those that are supposed to be close to them. We all know we are going to die, yet if death is primarily seen as a failure of a human body to survive, how can anyone feel welcome, connected, and appreciated within their local social context?

Secondly, all ecologies of care are fractal in nature, extending over many levels of scale. Complex life forms include vast and diverse biomes of microorganisms, and all living beings can only sustain themselves in the presence of other living beings or in the presence of conditions co-created in collaboration with other living beings. Plants have integrated parts that are designed to be eaten by animals into their reproductive cycle, and animals are part of complex food webs.

Overall, the complexity of the global planetary ecosystem / ecology of care far exceeds human comprehensibility. Humans evolved to adequately comprehend human scale ecologies of care, both individually and collectively, in terms of cultural practices.

It is only in the context of agriculture and written language that powering-up human social relationships has allowed the size of human groups to exceed human scale. It is important to realise that the emergence of super-human scale groups was an emergent phenomenon that evolved relatively rapidly, in the abstract realm of culture, compared to the much slower speed of biological / genetic evolution. The emergence of powered-up empires happened without any commensurate evolution of individual human cognitive and emotional capacities, and without a commensurate collective understanding of the effect on the overall human ecological footprint.

Looking back over the course of the history of all human empire building attempts with 20/20 hindsight, we have clear evidence that powered-up empires consistently induce a degradation of ecological diversity, which inevitably results in an eventual collapse of social complexity. Powered-up empires can be conceptualised as ecologically toxic agents, resulting in a brittle cancerous mono-culture. At human scale, empires manifest in terms of social diseases.

The modern myth of technological progress denies the cyclical nature of life. It completely lacks appreciation of the deep wisdom that is embodied in the compostability of all life.

The delusion of technological progress, and the delusional idea of humans being able to adequately to understand and control the living planet via hierarchically powered-up institutions is the ultimate example of failing to understand human cognitive and emotional limits. Many indigenous people and otherwise marginalised people clearly see the dangers of WEIRD anthropocentric hubris and self-importance.

Healthy and unhealthy freedoms

The emphasis on so-called individual freedoms in WEIRD societies primarily plays into the hands of abstract powered-up institutions. In a world where many adults are employed by powered-up abstract institutions, individual freedoms are largely limited to so-called consumer choices from a range of services and products over which the individual has no control whatsoever.

WEIRD freedoms

The corporate profit motive combined with the need to “earn a living” leave little room for consumer choices to have any systemic impact, or for individuals to be more ethically discerning in the jobs that they engage in and the employers that they agree to work for. Furthermore, often economic constraints also prevent individuals from leaving toxic and isolating nuclear family systems.

The influence of the interests of capital and corporate power on the politics is no longer hidden. Bypassing and subverting the democratic process has become fully normalised. For example:

Amazon Web Services (AWS) asked Jacinda Ardern to appoint an “empowered” minister or senior officials to collaborate on getting an Overseas Investment Office consent without delays and to discuss bringing in skilled IT workers from abroad, among other things, an Official Information Act (OIA) response shows.

AWS also said: “We would very much like to discuss opportunities we see for fine-tuning New Zealand’s policy settings that can support public sector cloud technology enablement”, including how Amazon could meet the requirements to host highly classified data.

The 39-page OIA contains correspondence between Ardern, her office, and several of the dozen data centre companies that previously released documents show have been asking for government support and asking ministers to cut the red tape on their various data centre construction projects in Auckland and the South Island.

The two largest global players, AWS and Microsoft, are at the forefront of the correspondence.

Even the ways in which governments are ranked in terms of levels of corruption have been shaped by the interests of capital rather than by the interests of citizens. The open forms of corruption encountered in less-WEIRD countries are demonised, whilst the more sophisticated and hidden forms of corruption that dominate in WEIRD countries are not widely recognised as systemic problems.

Both the Internet and economic theories are best understood as prescriptive rather than as observational tools – as language systems that are based on specific European/North American cultural conventions that are assumed as “sensible” (common sense) or “obvious” (self-evident). With these language systems in place you can measure data flows and economic performance, but only in terms of the scope and the preconceived categories afforded by the formal protocols and languages.

The free flow of capital is the weapon of choice for conducting deadly economic wars. It is not a freedom that any society should aspire to.

It is not surprising that the current economic paradigm, in which corporations have seized the means of digital communication, is increasingly being referred to as techno-feudalism, neo-feudalism, enshitification, or inverted totalitarianism.

Human scale freedoms

The current human predicament is the result of the way in which the current mainstream human social operating system acts as a collective learning disability. The opportunity that presents itself today is to reflect critically on human hubris and human cognitive limitations, and on all the irreversible damage we have already inflicted on the Earth’s ecosystems and the biosphere. WEIRD societies are designed to distract from freedoms and agency at human scale. Debates about individualism vs super-human scale collectivism completely miss the point.

Humans evolved in human scale groups that enjoyed local autonomy – autonomous collaboration at human scale, without being embedded in larger abstract powered-up systems of command and control.

Furthermore, as outlined above, healthy human scale cultural organisms maintain many collaborative relationships with other cultural organisms. This provides individuals who find themselves trapped in a family system that is incompatible with their sensitivity profile and value system with opportunities to migrate to a different cultural organism, as needed even a cultural organism from a different cultural species, which is more aligned with their values and sensitivities.

Onwards!