There is a co-evolved natural pace to the flow of life at each of the different scales within the kingdoms of life. We currently live in a social world of magical thinking shaped by the cult of technological progress. The journey towards a healthier relationship with the ecosystems which we are part of starts with the introduction of new language and semantics. Co-creating ecologies of care beyond the human allows us to experience beauty in a world that is completely out of control.

Life

“Exalt not men, so that the people may not fight.
Prize not rare objects, so that the people may not steal.
Look not on desirable things, so that the people’s hearts be not troubled.
That is why the self-controlled man governs by stilling the emotions,
by quieting thought, by mastering the will, by increasing strength.
He always teaches the people to know the Inner Life, to desire the Inner Life.
He teaches the Masters of knowledge to cease from activity,
to act through activity of the Inner Life; then Inner Life will govern all.”

Laozi, Translated by Isabella Mears, 1916, Chapter 3 

“Heavenly Love is like water.
Water blesses all things,
It does not hurt them.
It loves the lowly place that men dislike,
Therefore it comes very near to Tao.
The Master loves to dwell upon the earth.
In his heart he loves Infinity,
In his benevolence he loves giving,
In his words he loves sincerity,
In his government he loves peace,
In his business affairs he loves ability,
In his movements he loves punctuality.
The Master, indeed, does not fight,
Therefore his Inner Life increases.”

Laozi, Translated by Isabella Mears, 1916, Chapter 8 

“To quiet down the heart to stay at a constant stillness,
To settle down the heart to remain in infinite emptiness,
All the myriad things are involved in constant motion, but I just gaze
into emptiness to unintentionally wait for the coming of the Mysterious Pass.
Yes, though all things flourish with myriad variations,
each one will eventually return to the very root of birth and death.
To return to the root needs constant stillness.
Only by staying in constant stillness can Congenital Nature be recovered.
To fully recover Congenital Nature is called ‘Chang.’
To know Chang is called enlightenment.
To no know Chang and to act blindly will result in disaster.
Only knowing Change, can one tolerate all;
Only tolerating all, can one be impartial.
By being impartial, can one be all-accomodating;
By being all-accommodating, one can equal Heaven;
By equaling Heaven, one can accomplish Tao, which lasts without death.
Only by accomplishing Tao, can one be rid of death and birth,
lasting eternally without any danger.”

Laozi, Translated by Hu Xuezhi, 2005, Chapter 16

“From great antiquity forth they have known and possessed it.
Those of the next level loved and praised it.
The next were in awe of it.
And the next despised it.
If you lack sincerity no one will believe you. 
How careful she is with her precious words!
When her work is complete and her job is finished,
Everybody says: “We did it!””

Laozi, Translated by Charles Muller, 1891, Chapter 17

Language

The journey towards a healthier relationship with the ecosystems which we are part of starts with the most powerful tool at our disposal, the introduction and consistent use of new language and new semantics. We are curating timeless concepts for nurturing and describing ecologies of care.

Our destination is beyond human comprehension, but ways of life that are in tune with our biological needs and cognitive limits are always within reach, even when we find ourselves in a self-created life destroying environment. All it takes is a shift in perspective, and corresponding shifts in the aspects of our lives that we value.

The delusion of control

“When people try to improve upon, and thus deviate from, the way Nature itself naturally functions,
they develop artificial codes of right and wrong.
When knowledge becomes highly abstract, men are deceived by mistaking abstractions for realities.
When instinctive family sympathies are replaced by rules for proper conduct then parents
become “responsible” and children become “dutiful”.
When corruption replaces genuine benevolence in government,
then loyalty oaths are demanded of officials.”

Laozi, Translated by Archie J. Bahm, 1958, Chapter 18 

The delusion of anthropocentric control becomes obvious when considering the destablilising geopolitical role of the US government and the MAD logic that is at work to perpetuate the perception that everything is “under control”. If anything the ability to interfere with the lives of millions of people and the ability to nuke the planet can be understood as desperate acts of attempting to project an image of being in control. The $ Assured Destructive ($AD) logic of capital is just as MAD, and no less deadly over the lifespan of the next generation. However $AD logic remains hidden under a veil of obfuscation by the religion of economics and the cult of technological “progress”.

Last week I listened to an interview with actuary Sandy Truston about a recent risk assessment of planetary health. Sandy Trust does a good job at explaining a bias in the education of scientists – the reluctance to actively engage with uncertainty, to publish and write extensively about unknowns and unknowables, and to think hard about the potential implications of these limits, rather than staying within the comfort zone of confidence intervals and statistical “significance”. 

Rather than face into reality,
deny, delay, distract, obfuscate,
absurd, of course, bizarre, even…

Not to avoid, not to prepare, not to change course.
Perhaps it has always been too much,
to expect this shift of consciousness,
to expect wisdom from the sapiens.

A civilization built on energy and materials,
and shared stories of collaboration,
just needed to heed the science,
to harvest energy from a different source,
to harness that ingenuity and adaptation,
all the busy endeavor, and drive,
to change the great systems of humanity,
food, education, finance, economy, transport, energy.

To change the beliefs of the humans,
those oh so carefully and expensively curated beliefs,
before they change the great systems of the planet.

That great miracle, the anti-entropic planet, Gaia,
the world system, billions of years of life,
gathering energy and creating order,
building organisms, ecosystems,
biomes, species, metabolisms,
life insanely complex,
delicate and delicious in its beauty.

A gift a bounty a resource to be exploited, conquered even,
for planes, holidays, Netflix,
celebrities and mangoes in December.
This is success, wealth, life, billions of years for this.
Things, stuff, distractions, ease, gossip, social media,
forget the yawning precipice of climate change,

Catching all the fish and replacing them with plastic,
forget the obesity, loneliness, sadness, and suicide,
the migrants, and the cities running out of water,
forget space junk and the sixth great extinction,
who needs the amazon when you have amazon.
Forget all this and more,
because well, because the economy, silly.

Forget the economy needs a society,
until AI trades bitcoins for the robots.
Society needs somewhere to live,
and food, air, water, shelter, community, meaning.
We saw a way at the branch we’re sitting on,
ignoring warnings it could bend or break.

It hasn’t yet.
Stop your wolf-crying antics.
Why can’t you be happy for the progress?
Look at all the people, the wealth, the technology.

Why can’t you see the future distress?
Heat, fire, flood, food and water shortages, the mess.

Quiet!
The football is on, and the celebrities are dancing.
Rather that than face reality.

Sandy Trust

The difference in the bias of working with statistics can perhaps be illustrated using Swiss cheese as a metaphor. Scientists focus on describing the substance of the cheese, pointing out the existence of holes, and perhaps speculating about the content of a particular hole within their discipline. A prudent actuary focuses on the holes, not only counting and measuring them, but also looking into how they are related and positioned, to understand the extent to which the integrity of the cheese may be compromised by the holes, all from a risk management perspective, i.e. exploring possible avenues to maximise the chances of ending up safe rather than sorry. I refer to this approach as the scale aware precautionary principle.

It is well understood that big industrial risks can’t really be quantified due to our limited insight into all the potential factors. Therefore, at the level of reinsurance, it is common practice to rely on the more predictable earnings from insuring small risks (individual households, health etc.) to subsidise the insurance of big high impact industrial risks. Average citizens always pay the ultimate costs when disaster strikes. Your premiums for next year pay for the industrial scale losses from last year. Once insurers are dealing with genuinely existential risks, this logic no longer pans out … The $AD risks are now such that it is now becoming next to impossible to make profits without insurance premiums exploding, making insurance unaffordable even for those with significant money. 

We currently live in a social world of magical thinking in all layers of the cultural layer cake of enshitification.

“To conquer and rule the world, I think, is not achievable.
The world is like a sacred utensil, which cannot be taken and held.
Whoever tries to conquer it will fail.
Whoever tries to hold it will lose it.
Thus, the sage does not try this, so he can avoid failure.
The sage does not try to own the world, so he loses nothing.
Things can be fast or slow, warm or cool, strong or weak, light or heavy.
The sage avoids the excessive, extravagant, and grandiose.”

Laozi, Translated by Thomas Z. Zhang, Chapter 29

Collaborative niche construction

“Those who aid a government with the Way
Will not threaten the world with military power,
And are therefore returned with kindness in all affairs.
Where armies have stayed will grow only thorns and bush.
When military force dominates, an inauspicious year follows.
Wise leaders prefer natural results than uses of force.
And win victories that would result naturally.
They win without boasting about their valor,
Or feeling proud of their victories,
Or looking triumphant everywhere.
They win but feel guilty as if they were forced to it.
They win without military reinforcement.
Things that have become strong will begin to weaken.
That which weakens is against the Way.
What is against the Way cannot last long.”

Laozi, Translated by Liu Qixuan, Chapter 30 

The fundamental mismatch between hierarchical anthropocentric ideologies and ideologies that embrace conscious collaborative niche construction beyond the human can not be over-emphasised. The former is best understood as a form of collective stupidity and the later is best understood as the natural flow of life that encapsulates 4+ billion years of Gaia’s wisdom.

Homo symbolicus is the result of co-evolutionary processes (within groups and between groups) within the context of a species in which the capacity for symbolic culture was emerging.

Humans applied their indigenous understanding of co-evolutionary processes within an ecological context, consciously engaging in co-evolution with plants and later animals. What modern anthropocentric humans fail to see is the extent to which “selective breeding” is a co-evolutionary process, to which the plants and animals are contributing as much as the humans. Indigenous societies have not yet lost this understanding. Co-evolution is what Riane Eisler describes as the partnership model. Did humans breed wheat, or did the wheat breed humans? Etc.

The WEIRD notion of “intelligence” is misguided, fundamentally misaligned with Gaia’s wisdom.

10,000 years of anthropocentric empire building attempts, i.e. head to head competition based on a myopic anthropocentric frame of evolution that is incredibly wasteful in terms of energy and resources, can be understood as a life destroying cultural disease. This life destroying cultural disease has now triggered co-evolutionary processes within Gaia. When looked at on evolutionary time scales these processes are kicking in incredibly rapidly, clamping down on the myopic mono-species frame of evolution.

“A weapon is a means that causes affliction; it should be discarded.
Therefore, he who follows Tao does not use weapons. 
A good leader is yielding.
He uses power only for defense.
He exerts every effort to maintain peace.
To glorify oneself with military victory means to rejoice at killing of people.
Is it right to respect him who is glad about killing? 
Respect leads to wellbeing.
Wellbeing contributes to the creative process. 
Violence leads to afflictions. 
If many people are killed, it is grievous.
The victory has to be celebrated?
With a funeral ceremony.”

Laozi, Translated by Mikhail Nilolenko, Chapter 31

The wisdom of time

“Tao is forever undefined.
Like uncarved wood, it seems insignificant; yet no one can command it.
If rulers could abide with it, they would rule everything.
The universe would unify and rain the dew of peace,
beyond anyone’s command, evenly on all.
When the uncarved wood is cut up, the parts need names.
One must know when to stop cutting.
All things flow to Tao, like rivers flowing to the sea.”

Laozi, Translated by Ned Ludd, Chapter 32  

The wisdom of time is an important dimension within all co-evolutionary processes. This becomes obvious when reflecting on the distributions of typical life spans across all the different species across all the kingdoms of life within Gaia, from the rapid co-evolutionary cycles of viruses and bacteria to the long cycles of co-evolution in forest ecoystems and coral reefs, and everything in between.

There is a co-evolved natural pace to the flow of life at each of the different scales and for each of the species within the kingdoms of life. 

Attempting to break the pace of the flow of life always comes with consequences, many of which can not be predicted. There are hard limits to the predicability of complex, chaotic, and adaptive systems.

Ignoring these limits is at best a waste of precious time and resources and at worst it can be outright suicidal. This is how humans have ended up in the predicament we now find ourselves in, and Gaia’s timeless wisdom is stepping in to sort out the mess on behalf of the broader community of life. We have the choice of rejoining the flow and the pace of life, or to continue to out-complete the pace of life with mindless busyness.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that human languages have come up with all the concepts needed to describe co-evolutionary processes. When I read about the thoughts of Daoist philosophers I am reading about ancient human wisdom about the pace of the flow of life. In our language we also still say things like ‘good things take time’. None of this wisdom is compatible with the get rich quick [at the expense of others] schemes that have been enabled by mindless exploitation of a one-off store of fossilised energy that is running out, not to mention all the destruction of beauty (diversity) that this has brought about. 

Humans have evolved to observe the effects of their activities over human lifetimes, and we have the evolved capacity of compassion to deliberate at human scale, to think at least 7 generations ahead, and we have the cognitive capacity to learn from the activities of the last 7 generations.

Presently, in the industrial and so-called “post industrial era”, which critically depends on industrial processes, as long as we mindlessly worship the super human scale institutions that have emerged over the last 10,000 years, we are neglecting these valuable life affirming human capacities. The global mono-cult has replaced timeless wisdom with mindless busyness.

The delusion of predictability

“One who seeks knowledge learns something new every day.
One who seeks the Tao unlearns something new every day.
Less and less remains until you arrive at non-action.
When you arrive at non-action,
nothing will be left undone.
Mastery of the world is achieved
by letting things take their natural course.
You can not master the world by changing the natural way.”

Laozi, Translated by John H. McDonald, Chapter 48

If life generates conditions conducive to life, then what is it that generates conditions that destroys life?

AI hype is resulting in a new avalanche of addictive get-rich-quick scheme for WEIRD humans. We saw equivalent get-rich-quick schemes in the lead-up to the GFC in the domain of high frequency trading. The same cycle is repeating. It is exactly the same myopic short term dog-eat-dog logic in combination with an addictive behaviourist carrot of quick rewards that is driving these hypes. All the people who get involved in these hypes have highly addictive tendencies. They are hopeless addicts.

Living systems are fundamentally different from anthropocentric human engineered systems in the frantic digital sphere that ignore the natural pace of the flow of life.

Cults that deny absolute limits of predictability and ecological resilience are very short lived phenomena on evolutionary time scales. The hypernormative spectacle is disconnected from the wonder of life experienced by all biological organisms.

Is this what we call progress?

Brian Klaas highlights the impact of working with the life denying assumptions of homo economicus, but he misses the co-evolved human scale qualities and limitations of homo symbolicus. The conclusion is spot-on for a world of homo economicus. Yet we live in a world of co-evolved human scale homo symbolicus, with delusional institutions and digital tools that religiously calculate and predict the behaviour of homo economicus, and this puts a twist on the conclusions to draw. A fitting quote from another scholar:

In our work we’ve tried to test some of the basic predictions made by the Homo economics model using some simple tools from behavioral economics applied across a diverse swath of human societies. Not only do we find that the Homo economicus predictions fail in every society (24 societies, multiple communities per society), but instructively, we find that it fails in different ways in different societies. Nevertheless, after our paper “In search of Homo economicus” in 2001 in the American Economic Review, we continued to search for him. Eventually, we did find him. He turned out to be a chimpanzee. The canonical predictions of the Homo economicus model have proved remarkably successful in predicting chimpanzee behavior in simple experiments. So, all theoretical work was not wasted, it was just applied to the wrong species.

Joseph Henrich, What Economists Haven’t Found: Humans

No wonder people are Con-Fused.

It is dangerous and naive to assume that current and future human societies are and will always have super-human scale institutions and hierarchical structures of power. It is particularly dangerous to assume that we can somehow come up with “better” ways of preventing the most power hungry from seizing and abusing power. 

We also need to consider how neurodiversity plays out in our species and in all species with nervous systems.

The dangers of powered up relationships and institutions are best understood in a frame of social power as having addictive potential and in terms of individual neurological differences in susceptibility to this form of addiction.

Only hopeless addicts are capable of ignoring the evidence that has been staring us in the face for decades, at the very least for the duration of our lifetimes. It becomes clear that we should perhaps aim for cultural norms that minimise the addictive potential of social power, i.e. societies that don’t assume that social power hierarchies are a universal, timeless, and necessary organising principle.

“In governing people and serving heaven, there is nothing better than moderation.
To be moderate is to follow Tao without straying.
To follow Tao without straying is to become filled with good energy.
To be filled with good energy is to overcome all things.
To overcome all things is to know that all things are possible.
She who knows that all things are possible is fit to govern people.
Because she is one with the mother, her roots go deep,
her foundation stands firm, her life lasts long, her vision endures.”

Laozi, Translated by Brian Browne Walker, 1996, Chapter 59 

In a de-powered radically egalitarian society there is simply no supply to fuel the highly addictive potential of social power. Those with an inclination towards addiction to social power are kept sober by the strict enforcement of egalitarian norms.

What Brian Klaas is missing is faith in the co-evolved wisdom of Gaia. As the Daoists remind us, humour is one of the important social tools on the road towards de-powering.

When people are asleep, their spirits wander off; when they are awake, their bodies are like an open door, so that everything they touch becomes an entanglement. Day after day they use their minds to stir up trouble; they become boastful, sneaky, secretive. They are consumed with anxiety over trivial matters but remain arrogantly oblivious to the things truly worth fearing. Their words fly from their mouths like crossbow bolts, so sure are they that they know right from wrong. They cling to their positions as though they had sworn an oath, so sure are they of victory. Their gradual decline is like autumn fading into winter—this is how they dwindle day by day. They drown in what they do—you cannot make them turn back. They begin to suffocate, as though sealed up in a box—this is how they decline into senility. And as their minds approach death, nothing can cause them to turn back toward the light.

Zhuangzi

In living systems beyond the human, trustworthy relationships at all levels of scale are the primary anchors of stability and the source of adaptiveness and creative collaboration, manifesting in mycorrhizal neurodivergent networks.

“She who follows the way of the Tao
will draw the world to her steps.
She can go without fear of being injured,
because she has found peace and tranquility in her heart.
Where there is music and good food,
people will stop to enjoy it.
But words spoken of the Tao
seem to them boring and stale.
When looked at, there is nothing for them to see.
When listened for, there is nothing for them to hear.
Yet if they put it to use, it would never be exhausted.”

Laozi, Translated by J. H. McDonald, 1996, Chapter 35

“The movement of Tao in the course of time is to return to Simplicity;
The working of Tao is so subtle that its ostensible effect may not be immediately noticeable.
Myriad things and creatures on Earth were originated from something;
This something describable by us was launched ultimately from nothing which is beyond our description.”

Laozi, Translated by Lee Sun Chen Org, Chapter 40

“The Taoist has no opinions
He simply listens, and acts
He treats those who are good as worthy
He treats those who aren’t good as worthy, too
And so he finds their goodness
He gives those who are honorable his trust
He gives those who are dishonorable his trust, too
And so he gains their trust.”

Laozi, Translated by Ted Wrigley, Chapter 49

The obsession with so-called artificial intelligence is a logical extension of the WEIRD anthropocentric delusion, a version 2.0 of homo economicus that appears to have shed the shackles of biological limitations … until one of the long forgotten or emergent unknowns and no-longer-applicable assumptions throws a spanner into the gears of the mechanistic probabilistic house of cards of predictability, replacing one set of apparent certainties with another.

Understanding that many WEIRD humans are obsessed with the fear of losing the illusion of control in an inherently uncontrollable world that is completely out of control is a catalyst for metamorphosis. 

Our capacity to understand is limited to human scale, but this understanding is within our reach. What I see happening with AI is an extension of engineer’s disease to all aspects of human life, including the scientific enterprise, which has been reduced to “data science” and “computation”. Not only is the map being confused with the territory of lived experience – the blind spot nicely articulated by Evan Thomson, but the shaved off “insignificant” parts of all the bell curves and the role of human scale in sense making are also part of the blind spot.

The human spirit is the ability to make sense (co-create coherence) of the chaotic flow of a living ecology in which the limits of predictability play out at different scales of organisms, which evolved to experience and cycle through Gaia at specific spatial and temporal scales.

“Tao creates all things,
Virtue nurtures them.
Matter gives them forms, and
Environment allows them to succeed.
Thus all things honour Tao and value Virtue.
Tao being honoured and Virtue being valued,
They always occurred naturally without being dictated by anyone.

Thus:

Tao creates all things.
Virtue nurtures them:
They grow and develop;
Bear fruits and mature; and
Are cared for and protected.
To create, but not to possess;
To care for, but not to control;
To lead, but not to subjugate.
This is called the profound virtue.”

Laozi, Translated by Cheng, Chapter 51

My preferred framing of the current state of the institutions of the global mono-cult remains the cultural compost heap. The compost heap is very fertile. The process of composting is something to be encouraged. 

Adequately composted culture is what allows millions of new green shoots to thrive in the cracks of the global mono-cult. By definition, the cracks are the priceless spaces that escape quantification, they are impossible to observe through the lens of capital. Only the lens of compost reveals the real potential of c[r]apital.

“Since ancient times there have been those who have attained the subtle essence of the universe and thus become what they are.
Heaven attained the subtle essence of the universe and became clear.
Earth attained the subtle essence of the universe and became stable.
Divine spirits attained the subtle essence of the universe and became powerful.
The Valley of the Universe attained the subtle essence of the universe and became productive.
The myriad things attained the subtle essence of the universe and became prosperous.
The sages attained the subtle essence of the universe and became wise.
All became what they are by attaining the subtle essence of the universe and hence their true nature.
Extinction happens to one who violates his true nature.
Without being pure, Heaven would cease to be.
Without being stable, Earth would burst into bits.
Without maintaining their potency, spirits would disperse.
Without being productive, the vast Valley of the Universe would become exhausted.
Without being reproductive, the myriad things would perish.
Without fortifying themselves with integral virtue, sages would stumble and fall.
Greatness is rooted in plainness,
just as the low forms the foundation of the high.
Realizing this, the ancient sovereigns were content to style themselves as desolate, unworthy, and needy.
Therefore, one who does not separate his being from the nature of the universe follows the Integral Way.
He has no wish to sound like jingling jade pendants in order to court a good name,
nor like the rumbling of a stone rolling from a cliff in order to create a bad name.
Each one should work on one’s own subtle spiritual integration with the subtle essence of the universe.”

Laozi, Translated by Hua Ching Ni, 1995, Chapter 39 

More and more cosmolocal human scale ecologies of care are being woven at human pace. Small and slow is beautiful.

Love

“Faithful words may not be beautiful,
Beautiful words may not be faithful.
Those who love do not quarrel,
Those who quarrel do not love.
Those who know are not learned,
Those who are learned do not know.
The riches of the self-controlled man are in the Inner Life.
When he spends for others, he has more for himself.
When he gives to others, he has much more for himself.
Heavenly Tao blesses all and hurts no one.
The way of the self-controlled man is to act and not to fight.“

Laozi, Translated by Isabella Mears, 1916, Chapter 81  

Co-creating ecologies of care beyond the human allows us to experience beauty in a world that is completely out of control. Whether we like it or not, we are all subject to human cognitive and emotional limits. This means we all have the capacity to live in a household with up to around 5 people that constitute our most intimate relationships, to collaborate with around 15 close lifetime friends on a weekly basis, and to maintain up to 50 further friendships. All these genuine relationships that we maintain, if they are in a healthy state, are based on a foundation of mutual trust, compassion, and mutual aid – and not on the transactional logic of the invisible hand of the market.

For the purpose of understanding the purpose of our life, the trustworthy relationships we maintain constitute the bus on which we are travelling through life. Sitting in a bus and the delusion of having a driver who is “in control” are dangerous distractions. Instead of rearranging the seating order in a powered-up bus, it is time to board a de-powered bus or lifeboat. The chances of survival in a bus driving over a cliff are slim, and the chances of having fun along the way are zero. It is time to slam on the brakes, stop at the cliff, and get out the climbing gear, and to have some fun along the way.

“The world in reality is a beautifully interconnected world, and it’s interconnected through many many layers. It’s interconnected through consciousness, which is why we are spiritual beings in human form. But the plants outside my window are spiritual beings in plant form. But the plant of the lychee is in lychee form, and the tree of the mango is in mango form. They are just different expressions of one spiritual interconnected consciousness in the world.”

Vandana Shiva

Love is the art of living in a world that is completely out of control. We are part of Gaia. Our sensitivities serve a purpose, they equip us with love and compassion for all of Gaia. Is is easy to become overwhelmed. Love is the timeless language of life.

UPDATE: A few days after writing this article the following interview with philosopher and psychiatrist Thomas Fuchs appeared in my inbox. As part of the millions of human scale community co-creation initiatives in the modern cultural compost heap, more and more people are rediscovering timeless wisdom and indigenous understanding about the wonder of being alive.

Onwards, together, at human scale!

Photo by Yoann Boyer on Unsplash

Core ideas within Buddhist and Daoist spiritual traditions are reflective of the commonalities found across many human scale indigenous cultures. A compassionate frame of love as vulnerable mutual knowing is compatible with a panpsychic relational philosophy. Everyone wants their experience to be taken seriously. We are embodied spirits, compelled to make sense of this world, and we can only do so in good company.

Life

Life creates conditions conducive to life – Janine Benyus

This simple definition or observation strongly hints at the fact that dynamic process of life consists of feedback loops.

Life is entirely entirely relational, it is sacred, cyclical, fleeting, compostible, nested, regenerative, and it forever remains mysterious for all participants.

Spirits

Any high-dimensional space that provides a reasonable description of Gaia, i.e. all of life, including the potential of homo ecologus, is best conceptualised entirely relationally, from the very bottom layers of physics upwards.

Life consists entirely of relationships, which are feedback/learning loops, and these in turn, in aggregate, constitute the building blocks of what in our human animal scale perception is experienced as consciousness. There is no shortage of people who conceptualise life this way. This becomes very obvious when studying Eastern spiritual and philosophical texts. 

As humans, with our human limitations, we will never be able to scientifically “prove” to any quantifiable level of certainty that consciousness emerges in this way, but science will also never be capable of disproving that consciousness emerges and exists in this way. This in no way means that science is useless, it simply highlights the limits of science, which are part of the limits of human comprehensibility. In the same way, in the abstract symbolic universe of mathematics there are statements can’t ever be proven to be true or false, and we are not even equipped to identify all such statements.

At the spatial and temporal scales that are relevant for biological and ecological systems, the smallest feedback loops emerge between molecules, resulting the mind boggling complexity found in cell biology and the molecular genetic code. These feedback loops scale up to the largest feedback loops between bioregional terrestrial and marine ecosystems within Gaia. The widely popular anthropocentric conceptions of “consciousness” at best generalise to animals with brains, but exclude all other feedback loops in living systems from contributing to the lived experiences of consciousness at much smaller and much larger spatial and temporal scales.

Powered-up (positive) feedback loops are those feedback loops in which, over time, more information (whether molecules or in a more abstract code) piles up in some living cells or beings than in others. Such powered-up feedbacks are always temporary phenomena relative to the life spans of the living cells or beings involved. 

The bodies of human animals grow to a certain scale, and then they stay intact for a human lifetime. During the lifetime of a human animal all the molecular feedback loops within the human body (between cells, between organs, etc.) are maintained in a de-powered (balanced) state, fed by external energy from living food, resulting in “waste” that consists of building blocks that are ready to be reassembled into new life by thermonuclear energy of the sun.

Similarly, social feedback loops between human animals grow into relationships, and healthy relationships then stay intact for a human lifetime. Throughout life, all the feedback loops within a healthy relationship are maintained in a de-powered state, fed by shared lived experiences and shared understanding, resulting in cultural output that consists of building blocks that are ready to be absorbed by the local ecology of care, and integrated into new relationships within the local ecology of care.

Panpsychism

A universe conceptualised entirely in terms of dynamic feedback/learning loops leads to a panpsychic philosophy in which consciousness is omnipresent, at all levels of scale, which is compatible with Eastern spiritual traditions such as Buddhism and Daoism. It invites us to consider non-anthropocentric viewpoints, it alerts us to the cultural bias that is inherent in modern industrialised notions of “intelligence” and “success”, and it draws attention to the lower and upper limits of human scale, including our cognitive limitations and emotional limitations.

Spiritual traditions

Buddhism also known as Buddha Dharma, is an Indian religion^[a] and philosophical tradition based on teachings attributed to the Buddha, a wandering teacher who lived in the 6th or 5th century BCE.^[7] It is the world’s fourth-largest religion,^[8][9] with over 520 million followers, known as Buddhists, who comprise seven percent of the global population.^[10][11] It arose in the eastern Gangetic plain as a śramaṇa movement in the 5th century BCE, and gradually spread throughout much of Asia. Buddhism has subsequently played a major role in Asian culture and spirituality, eventually spreading to the West in the 20th century.^[12]

According to tradition, the Buddha instructed his followers in a path of development which leads to awakening and full liberation from dukkha (lit. ’suffering or unease’^{[note 1]}). He regarded this path as a Middle Way between extremes such as asceticism or sensual indulgence.^[17][18]

Buddhism focus on minimising suffering and unease corresponds directly to the strong active desire of hypersensitive neurodivergent people to minimise cognitive dissonance. It also hints at the social problems that arise when a culture has normalised or even insists on maintaining high levels of cognitive dissonance over extended periods.

Taoism or Daoism is a diverse philosophical and religious tradition indigenous to China, emphasizing harmony with the Tao 道 (pinyin: dào; Wade–Giles: tao⁴). With a range of meaning in Chinese philosophy, translations of Tao include ‘way’, ‘road’, ‘path’, or ‘technique’, generally understood in the Taoist sense as an enigmatic process of transformation ultimately underlying reality.^[1][2] Taoist thought has informed the development of various practices within the Taoist tradition and beyond, including forms of meditation, astrology, qigong, feng shui, and internal alchemy. A common goal of Taoist practice is self-cultivation, a deeper appreciation of the Tao, and more harmonious existence.

Taoist ethics vary, but generally emphasize such virtues as effortless action, naturalness, simplicity, and the three treasures of compassion, frugality, and humility.

Daoist virtues and treasures align with the sensitivity profiles of many neurodivergent people and constitute a timeless critique of all anthropocentric empire building attempts going all the way back to the early Warring States period (c. 450 – c. 300 BCE), including a call for disengaging from and subverting such attempts.

Taken together, the core ideas within Buddhist and Daoist spiritual traditions are reflective of the commonalities found across many human scale indigenous cultures, including the virtues and operating principles found in egalitarian hunter gatherer societies. Foundational Daoist texts such as Zhuangzi also emphasise the important role of humour in subverting and weakening anthropocentric empire building attempts.

Love

All my work is rooted in caring deeply for the Earth, loving her deeply, and therefore never letting harm come to her… So i decided to tell the story of of my love for the Earth, which is staying alive, my love for life, my deep passion for life, because part of what has been exiled is life itself… I realized that what connects life to is love. The microorganism is giving love to the plant, the bee is giving love to the flower… The world in reality is a beautifully interconnected world, and it’s interconnected through many many layers. It’s interconnected through consciousness, which is why we are spiritual beings in human form. But the plants outside my window are spiritual beings in plant form. But the plant of the lychee is in lychee form, and the tree of the mango is in mango form. They are just different expressions of one spiritual interconnected consciousness in the world.

– Vandana Shiva

The extent to which we are alive emerges from the products of mutual trust, commitments, and shared understanding and experiences in all our relationships.

By virtue of their scale and design, so-called “relationships” with abstract super-human scale anthropocentric institutions are devoid of genuine shared understanding and experiences. The more a culture forces people to trust and “invest in” such “relationships”, the less capacity we have for genuine relationships with living beings, the less our lives are shaped by mutual trust, and the less alive we are.

Once we understand these dynamics, and consciously reorient our lives towards human scale, the prospect of “collapse” of institutions can be understood from a sober perspective – as the expiry of a social license that was inherently invalid all along. There is so much for us to learn from indigenous societies that have not yet been fully crushed by the lie of homo economicus. This reminds me of Eduardo Kohn’s important book on anthropology beyond the human. Here is a good introduction:

We can understand relationships as continuous multi-modal de-powered dialogues within ecologies of care, including the resulting entanglements of our inner worlds.

A few days ago I listened to Richard Watson’s reframing of evolution, corresponding to what I refer to as collaborative niche construction and the compassionate framing of conscious evolutionary design: 

It is refreshing to hear more voices arguing for reframing evolution in collaborative terms. This has become rare in the modern world, even though Kropotkin wrote about it quite eloquently over 100 years ago.

The compassionate frame of love as vulnerable mutual knowing is compatible with a panpsychic relational philosophy of the universe based on feedback/learning loops and the life affirmative language of ecologies of care.

Sensitivity profiles

All humans have unique sensitivity profiles that are shaped by our neurological baseline dispositions as well as all our lived experiences in the specific ecological contexts we have been embedded in. This is especially true for hypersensitive neurodivergent people, many of whom have experienced and been sensitised by traumatic experiences in a social world in which they are systematically marginalised, pathologised, and sometimes criminalised.

Our individually unique nervous systems and sensitivities develop and evolve over the course of our lives. 85% of neurodivergent adults often or always feel overwhelmed and misunderstood, and over 60% often or always feel disrespected and unsafe. Our overall sense of wellbeing is determined by alignment between our sensitivity profiles and the ecology of care we are embedded in (or not).

The official diagnostic criteria for “autism” are deeply entangled with symptoms of complex trauma. Those who identify as Autistic and many other neurodivergent people clearly have uncommon baseline sensitivity profiles from birth, but then traumatic lived experiences in the modern hypernormative industrialised world pile on top. In the end it is impossible to say where “autism” stops and where “trauma responses” begin.

The conclusion is that every human is a unique repository of lived experiences. The paradigm of the modern medical model that is focused on diagnosing and treating individuals is limiting in many ways, and unless these limits are fully acknowledged, it can result in significant harm, especially amongst those who are intersectionally marginalised.

Everyone wants their experience to be taken seriously. Simplistic and pathologising diagnostic labels and therapies centred on decontextualised individuals will never be up to the job. Our unique sensitivity profiles, which encompass our entire nervous systems, in no way limited to our brains, shape our unique way of sensing and making sense of the world.

Those who have been actively involved in the neurodiversity and disability movements for a number of years, in particular neurodiversity activists who are committed towards genuine paradigmatic change, are advocating for intersectional solidarity beyond labels, and are taking issue with the cookie cutter categories found in the DSM that gloss over the uniqueness of every lived experience.

I relate to the following conversation with Minna Salami on multiple levels, especially given her transcultural context that spans Nigeria, Germany, Sweden, and other cultural environments.

Powered-up relationships (persistent unbalanced feedback loops) between humans generate cognitive dissonance, which is experienced as a dis-ease that demands to be resolved. There is ample evidence that ignoring or suppressing cognitive dissonance for extended periods results in mental, spiritual, and bodily diseases.

I have been testing this theory of cognitive dissonance for a number of years. It explains my own experiences, and it seems capable of explaining the experiences of many others I have shared the theory with. Interestingly, the theory nicely fits together with the results of Michael Tomasello’s experimental developmental psychological research, as well as with Camilla Power’s biological and cultural anthropological research.

Those humans who are labelled “hypersensitive” seem to be the ones who have a conscious awareness of cognitive dissonance and are compelled to take/avoid specific actions in order to reduce cognitive dissonance. Those humans who are not “hypersensitive” seem to be the ones who are able to tolerate cognitive dissonance over extended periods, and may not be able to connect the feeling or source of cognitive dissonance with their mental, spiritual, and bodily diseases. 

Hypersensitivities and the uniqueness of sensitivity profiles hints at differences in the levels of conscious lived experience of specific events, and it leads towards a theory of compatible vs. incompatible sensitivity profiles.

The psychological bell curves associated with the Devil’s Sadistic Manual (DSM) effectively define the bandwidth of “culturally acceptable” human sensitivity profiles, and they discount and pathologise “culturally unacceptable” human sensitivity profiles.

Culture co-evolution

All major evolutionary milestones in the history of Gaia have co-evolutionary characteristics, including lessons from the the emergence and co-evolution of biological cells and the subsequent co-evolution of multi-celled organisms. 

The empirical knowledge we have about cell biology teaches us a lot about the complementary roles of abstract symbol systems and semantics in co-evolutionary processes, it teaches us that evolutionary processes are inherently co-evolutionary, i.e. ecological processes rather than species-specific biological processes.

The semi-permeable membranes of cells provide a model for co-evolutionary processes between multiple living organisms that has been empirically “road tested” for billions of years by Gaia.

With the formal foundations of category theory, model theory, and denotational semantics, we are equipped to precisely articulate the interdependencies between abstract symbol systems and semantics, including the co-evolutionary processes that act on symbol systems and semantics.

Co-evolutionary processes between multiple cultural organisms are steeped in a paradigm of conscious collaborative niche construction rather than in mindless and extremely energy intensive and wasteful head-to-head competition.

Culture co-evolution at human scales entails the following:

1. The emergence of cultural practices between two regularly interacting human animals. Balanced relationships and de-powered dialogues are best understood and visualised as a feedback loop that results in a convergence and entanglement of our internal mental models and greater levels of shared understanding and compassion.
2. Within a human family or household that includes n human animals there are up to 1/2 n * (n – 1) relationships between human animals the co-evolution of relationships gives rise to additional cultural practices. 
3. Empirically we know that healthy human cultural organisms consist of multiple families or households that collaborate and live together on daily or weekly basis to form a coherent economic resource sharing unit, i.e. a human scale cultural organism. Within a human scale cultural organism that includes m families there are up to 1/2 m * (m – 1) relationships between families that co-evolve and give rise to additional cultural practices.
4. Relationships between families consist of relationships between specific people. So at the level of a human scale cultural organism of l human animals and m families there are a total of 1/2 l * (l – 1) relationships between human animals that co-evolve, plus 1/2 m * (m – 1) relationships between families that co-evolve.
5. Furthermore, empirically we know that human cultural organisms maintain collaborative relationships with a number of other human cultural organisms, which in turn consist of relationships between specific people, resulting in the co-evolution of interacting cultural organisms.

This provides us with a human scale framework to think and reason about cultural evolution with an entirely collaborative frame of omni-directional learning.

From within a co-evolutionary frame it becomes obvious that all head-to-head competitions are best understood as short-term and energy wasting distractions that are best clamped down on as soon as they become detectable within a family, within a cultural organism, or between cultural organisms.

These are the cultural foundations that are top of mind in egalitarian hunter gatherer societies, and the resulting cultural practices are the product of 300,000 years of culture co-evolution. This tells us everything we need to know about the priorities of values in healthy life affirming cultures, and it explains the continuously growing popularity of the Open Space approach to omni-directional learning introduced by Harrison Owen in the 1980s.

Hunter gathers and the work of academics like Eduardo Kohn expand the above co-evolutionary frame to relationships beyond the human. The collaborative frame beyond the human is also clearly visible in the observations and writings of Pëtr Kropotkin from 1902.

The cognitive and emotional limits of human scale become visible and obvious in the non-trivial challenges of preventing and de-escalating head-to-head competitions and conflicts between cultural organisms. However, there are well-documented examples of egalitarian societies that have apparently been successful at minimising head-to-head competitions and conflicts between cultural organisms over hundreds and thousands of years. We would do well to learn from such cultures, and then to apply what we learn to the design of digital communication, collaboration, and design tools for the next 200 years and beyond. The number of initiatives heading in this general direction has been slowly but steadily growing over the course of the last 20 years. The work of Brett Victor is another example of an initiative that has been going for 10+ years.

Beyond human scale, we can relax and have faith in Gaia’s wisdom. This is very much in line with the spirit of Open Space. Where invited, we can provide palliative care to the dying super-human scale institutions, including relevant education towards safe and viable exit paths for the inmates.

The human spirit within Gaia

Humans evolved to make sense of the world at human scales:

1. The human nervous system is a sense making organ that evolved to integrate at human scale into a human scale cultural organism, within which culture operates mainly as an energy saving tool. 
2. Human cultural organisms save energy by engaging in collaborative niche construction with a conscious primary focus on group wellbeing, and this has allowed humans to colonise and adapt to nearly all terrestrial ecosystems on the planet. 
3. Collaborative niche construction often even extends to relationships between local human cultural organisms, but it does not scale beyond the cognitive and emotional limitations of human scale. Therefore conflicts easily emerge when the local group size or the local density of groups exceeds these limits. Maintaining egalitarian collaborative relationships between human scale groups is stretching the limits of the human capacities for language and culture.

As part of an Open Source human scale heritage for future generations of humans, it is precisely in the context of collaborative niche construction that transparent and appropriately designed digital technological guardrails around the human capacities for language and culture could become the tools that extend the reliability of human collaborative niche construction to larger scales, without centralising any decision making powers in the hands of strongmen.

It is time to replace the 10,000 year old misguided faith in power drunk strongmen by a scientifically enlightened faith in 4+ billion years of Gaia’s evolved wisdom.

Radical egalitarianism is the architecture of the adaptive intelligence of the human species. This architecture differs significantly from the nervous systems of other primates, because other primates do not have comparable capacities for language and culture.

1. The primate nervous system is a sense making organ that evolved to integrate into small flexible competitive alliances within the context of a social dominance hierarchy, within which culture operates mainly as a social power amplifier within conflicts. 
2. Primate alliances amplify social power to weaken the position of social power at the top of the hierarchy, this is the paradigm of “collaborate only to compete”, which introduces an element of opportunistic cooperation that is only just sufficient for maintaining overall group coherence.
3. Primates do not consciously trust the collective intelligence of the group, and the primary focus of their mental faculties is the navigation of competitive social dynamics within a “collaborate only to compete” paradigm. This limitation, compounded by their lack of symbolic language, prevents them from developing a collective primate group scale repository of cultural wisdom and collective understanding of the local bioregional ecosystem that persists, is transmitted reliably, and evolves over the course of many generations.

If we think of human nervous systems as outlined above, it becomes obvious that:

1. The course of evolution of the human capacities for language and culture has optimised for continuous collaborative niche construction based on stable relationships within human cultural organisms.
2. Human gene-culture co-evolution will have favoured the dimensions of variability and diversity that we observe between individual humans today. Human neurodiversity is best studied and understood at human scale.
3. It only makes sense to explore adaptive levels of human diversity vs maladaptive levels of human diversity or uniformity by comparing human scale cultural organisms.

It is absurd to attempt to define “normal” or “adaptiveness” at the level of individual humans. 

These observations give us a framework for positioning and reasoning about internalised ableism. WEIRD societies have become detached from the evolutionary roots of our capacity for culture. We are surrounded by Guy Debord’s Spectacle. Not only is hardly anything ever is what it seems to be, from an atomised individualistic position, surrounded by self-interested homo economicus, we can only anchor ourselves in the non-human biological world, and we have to treat all human cultural construction with suspicion.

This is a world where, in the absence of trust based human scale ecologies of care, institutionalised BS in the form of corporations led by strongmen is the only accessible anchor point for the social world, especially given that nearly all digital means of communication have been seized by corporations.

In the cultural metamorphosis that is in progress, Gaia is the only true authority. Every year she speaks with greater authority to all of us.

Becoming aware of cultural bias

To become consciously aware of cultural bias across all human endeavours, it helps to think of as academia as consisting of two subsystems that are connected via a learning / feedback loop, roughly as follows:  

Human cultural output as part of Gaia

1. the humanities
2. mathematics
3. statistics and engineering

Human attempts at understanding Gaia

1. global studies and political science
2. the earth sciences
3. physics
4. chemistry
5. ecology
6. all of biology minus WEIRD bias in evolutionary biology
7. the medical sciences minus WEIRD psychiatry
8. the social sciences minus WEIRD psychology

With these distinctions in mind we can critically examine our understanding of Gaia in terms of the humanities, the mathematical disciplines, and the statistics and engineering that are framing our scientific investigations. We can become explicit about all the cultural assumptions that underpin the sciences. Mathematics stands out as the one discipline that is religiously focused on making all assumptions explicit.

Distinguishing human cultural outputs from empirical scientific human attempts of understanding Gaia brings internalised ableism into the focal point of a critical lens, linking it to the modern human predicament, and exposing the dangerous levels of pseudoscience in the dark triad of “scientific” disciplines hinted at in the conversation “Artificial Intelligence, Dark Patterns, and the Digital Economy”  with Stuart Mills:

1. WEIRD economics (economics & business administration)
2. the psychologically “normal(ised)” WEIRD human (psychiatry & psychology)
3. digital automation of WEIRD behaviour (computer science & data science)

The questionable social license of this triad of WEIRD disciplines mainly tends to be constructed by referencing results from the other two elements of the triad, and manifests in a language that normalises violence.

The cultural challenge in engineering is an active disinterest in making all assumptions explicit, and instead, as needed, relying on WEIRDly convenient assumptions baked into the dark triad of “scientific” disciplines to advance the arrow of “progress”. This is reflected in the “shut up and calculate” attitude to unknowns and the glaring absence of any sensible scale aware precautionary principle.

A perhaps less obvious dimension of completely “normal” internalised ableism manifests in the age bracket in which homo economicus is considered to be “productive” or “useful”, i.e. employable and exploitable for profit, roughly the period between the ages of 20 and 65. Everyone outside this age bracket is by default considered to be an economic burden in modern society, including the “costs” of educating the under 20s and taking care of the over 65s.

The religion of economics has legitimised an obsession with maximising the quantifiable economic “utility” that can be extracted from a human life. How else could anyone ever come up with the absurd notion of “net worth”?

Within the frame of maximising economic utility, in-depth intergenerational dialogues beyond those that are part of the indoctrination system are undesirable. Homo economicus thrives in environments of stratified age cohorts (generations X, Y, Z, …)  that are competing against each other, thereby reducing valuable bidirectional intergenerational learning, and creating opportunities for marketing and selling age cohort specific commercial services and products.

Reviving trust in humanity

Nothing in the atomised modern social world makes sense anymore, because human scale cultural organisms, including understanding of the life sustaining and adaptive importance of such organisms have been eroded from living memory. The human spirit has been broken, i.e. faith in humanity and faith in Gaia has been shaken to the core.

All the dynamics that characterise a breakdown of honest communication in good faith, or a lack of experience with de-powerd dialogue / non-violent communication manifest in fairly obvious symptoms:

1. Using persuasive techniques to encourage another to adopt an opinion (ABA and the entire behaviourist bag of tricks) – rather than listening and engaging in deeper compassionate dialogue to understand the other.
2. Casting doubt on observations and assessments of another, in domains or contexts in which the other is more intimately familiar with the context – rather than listening and respecting the contextually informed observations of the other.
3. Ignoring questions that express a desire from another to understand motivations and expressed feelings – rather than openly sharing motivations and feelings.
4. There are likely further symptoms …

The competitive frame of homo economicus fully normalises the compulsion of being seen as “independent and strong”. Fears of exposing vulnerabilities pave the path for a culture of ubiquitous mistrust and mental health problems. This is the cult(ure) of internalised ableism.

This state of affairs leaves modern humans in a desolate, isolated position from which extending deep trust to other humans has become seemingly impossible for many. Amongst other things, we see this reflected in the AutCollab Research data, which clearly shows how much Autistic and otherwise neurodivergent people would love to help others, including strangers in need, but at the same time many are [very] afraid to dare ask for help.

The deep indoctrination in the myth of homo economicus has also made modern humans distrustful of themselves. The vast majority of attempts that people undertake to become “successful” within the dominant cultural frame leaves people to conclude deep down that “there must be something wrong with me” and likely “I did not try hard enough”. 

The result is an epidemic of self hate and shame. 

The effects of self hate are amplified by the social standards and pathologising labels documented in the Devil’s Sadistic Manual (the DSM). David Mackler focuses on self hate inflicted by parents on children, but there are many other avenues within the toxic social system that lead towards self hate.

To make matters worse, on the few occasions where people “succeed within the system”, they must find a way of rationalising and justifying their “success”. This entails suppressing any negative feelings they may have developed on the path towards success, which in many cases involved ethical corner-cutting and grandiose perception management in order to “win” the culturally prescribed competitive social game. In other words, becoming successful usually involves suppression of our innate human compassion for others and in some cases knowingly inflicting harm on others in order to “win”. 

The result is an epidemic of deeply suppressed guilt hidden underneath outwardly narcissistic behaviours in order to survive in a toxic life denying society.

Yet another perverse effect of the predicament of internalised ableism is seen in some of the WEIRD therapies devised to address the pathologies listed in the DSM, which basically teach therapists techniques for:

1. Making people feel better about themselves by identifying other people who have harmed them, which inevitably involves some attribution of blame, and thereby to some extent it distracts from clearly seeing the systemic patterns of intergenerational trauma that are at work.
2. Encouraging people to believe that working on “themselves” will eventually allow them to become “successful”, and thereby pushing people back into the environment that is ruled by the toxic rules for “success”.

These toxic patterns will never seize to be perpetuated until the ideology of homo economicus is discarded. Growing numbers of WEIRD therapists are leaving their “professions” or are seeking to leave their “profession”. Over the years I have offered peer support to quite a number of therapists and recovering therapists. I deeply feel their pain.

Everyone in the WEIRD world is to some extent entrapped by the system. Even those who are (re)learning local human powered subsistence level ways of communal living and surviving, minimising their consumption, often rely on some level of financial “investments” to sustain themselves, and thereby end up with one foot or at least a few toes in the toxic system, contributing to its continuation.

A healthier way to think about our remaining entanglement with homo economicus is to understand it as a form of palliative care for dying institutions, by incrementally equipping the inmates with viable exit paths. We can encourage the dying process of institutions as they are incrementally abandoned and become entirely obsolete.

2025 is the UN International Year of Cooperatives. Cooperatives Build a Better World, showcasing the enduring global impact cooperatives have everywhere. This theme puts a spotlight on how the cooperative model is an essential solution to overcome many global challenges.

Buddhist and Daoist values and virtues can provide overarching guidance along the way:

1. Minimise the human and non-human suffering on the downwards slope of homo economicus, and 
2. Maximise joy as part of the metamorphisis of human scale cultural organisms in the cultural compost heap.

An obvious way of minimising human suffering is to share the framing and reasoning outlined above with emerging human scale ecologies of care:

1. to equip people to be more gentle with themselves, 
2. to reassure them that you know that they are doing the best they can within the bounds of their human cognitive and emotional limits, 
3. and to remind them that everyone can contribute to the metamorphosis by letting go of internalised ableism, by appreciating and actively supporting the work of those who are the agents within the metamorphosis, and by relying on non-violent resistance as needed to prevent avoidable harm and to support the dying process of the system.

Our nervous systems are deeply connected at human scale. We are embodied spirits, everything is connected. Interfaces limit our humanity. We evolved to be fully present with each other, without interfaces.

A lot of what I have been writing about over the course of the last two years can be understood as an attempt of making the insights of neurodivergent people like DJ White with unique life paths more accessible to a somewhat broader audience, i.e. the audience of all those who are part of one of the millions of emergent human scale cultural organisms that are growing in the cultural compost heap. Beyond alignment with DJ White’s advice on committing to a sacred mission at human scale, I relate to his concerns for the oceans.

My re-examination of social systems transcends old categories. It uses a new method of analysis (the study of relational dynamics) that draws from a larger data base than conventional studies. It looks at a much larger, holistic picture that includes the whole of humanity, both its female and male halves; the whole of our lives, not only politics and economics but where we all live, in our family and other intimate relations; and the whole of our history, including the thousands of years we call prehistory.

Looking at this more complete picture makes it possible to see interactive relationships or configurations that are not visible otherwise. There were no names for these social configurations, so I called one the domination system and the other the partnership system.

Once we understand these configurations, it becomes clear that the real struggle for our future is not religious vs. secular, East vs. West, South vs. North, right vs. left, etc. If you think about it, societies in all these categories were, and are, repressive, violent, and unjust.

The real struggle is within societies in every one of these categories, between people who want to move to a more caring and equitable world and those who still believe insensitivity, cruelty, and destructiveness – and all the misery they lead to – are “just human nature” – the inevitable result of original sin or selfish genes.

We’re all familiar with relations of domination and submission from our own lives. We know the pain, fear, and tension of relations based on coercion and accommodation, of jockeying for control, of trying to manipulate and cajole when we are unable to express our real feelings and needs, of the tug of war for that illusory moment of power rather than powerlessness, of our unfulfilled yearning for caring and mutuality, of all the misery, suffering, and lost lives and potentials that come from these kinds of relations.

Most of us have also, at least intermittently, experienced another way of being, one where we feel safe and seen for who we truly are, where our essential humanity and that of others shines through, perhaps only for a little while, lifting our hearts and spirits, enfolding us in a sense that the world can after all be right, that we are valued and valuable.

Our human yearning for caring connections, for peace rather than war, for equality rather than inequality, for freedom rather than oppression, can be seen as part of our genetic equipment. The degree to which this yearning can be realized is not a matter of changing our genes, but of building partnership social structures and beliefs.

In the domination system, somebody has to be on top and somebody has to be on the bottom. People learn, starting in early childhood, to obey orders without question. They learn to carry a harsh voice in their heads telling them they’re no good, they don’t deserve love, they need to be punished. Families and societies are based on control that is explicitly or implicitly backed up by guilt, fear, and force. The world is divided into in-groups and out-groups, with those who are different seen as enemies to be conquered or destroyed.

In contrast, the partnership system supports mutually respectful and caring relations. Because there is no need to maintain rigid rankings of control, there is also no built-in need for abuse and violence. Partnership relations free our innate capacity to feel joy, to play. They enable us to grow mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. This is true for individuals, families, and whole societies.

From Partnership 101, Riane Eisler, 2021

Making sense of the world

We are all compelled to make sense of this world, and we can only do so in good company at human scales. We evolved to experience cognitive dissonance as discomfort and to strive towards eliminating it at human scale.

It is only when looking at the time scale of human evolutionary history that we can recognise powered-up civilisations as a cultural disease instead of confusing them with a misguided “arrow of progress”, and in the process tricking ourselves into believing that “progress” can be the result of homo economicus and tools designed in the image of homo economicus, amplifying the worst possible human impulses.

The term “intelligence” has been shoehorned into a very WEIRD anthropocentric notion of “success” or “progress” that is designed to compel humans to “live up to” the doctrine of the cult leaders of homo economicus. When “intelligence” (artificial or otherwise) has been reduced to anything that helps us justify and maintain our addictions in the face of growing levels of cognitive dissonance, can we sink any lower?

It is terribly easy to design tools that surpass human capabilities. We have been doing this for several hundred thousand years. It seems this has been forgotten. We are “great” tool makers, and always have been. Great in quotes, because our cognitive and perhaps even more so our emotional limitations can get in the way of us understanding the full ecological implications of deploying our powered-up tools.

Advanced tools in the hands of power addicts have always been a bad idea. As the saying goes, “a fool with a tool is still a fool.” We have have made the mistake of worshipping the human capability for advanced recursive tool design as “intelligence”. The result is a human social world devoid of wisdom and growing levels of cognitive dissonance.

Wisdom is the capacity to understand the difference between the human capability for advanced recursive tool design and human ecological understanding.

Gaia is calling for a conscious paradigmatic shift in the design of our tools away from the life denying religion of homo economicus towards a life affirming religion of homo ecologus. In the same way that badly designed digital tools can amplify the worst human impulses, well designed digital tools hold the potential to amplify the noblest of human impulses on our 200+ years journey of coming down from the carbon pulse.

Fellow Autist DJ White urges us to at least try to gently land the airliner of industrialised civilisation in a suitably flat corn field instead of hoping for some miracle to refill the fuel tanks while continuing at full throttle.

Join us!

Autistic, Authentic, and Autonomous ecologies of care beyond the human grow organically, at human scale, at a human pace, one trusted relationship at a time. Join us!

The human capacity for language serves to improve understanding and trust, fostering collaboration instead of competition. This contradicts capitalist interpretations of evolution and supports the notion of human collaboration. Society’s hierarchical structure and wealth creation methods perpetuate exploitation, leading to societal sickness. To heal, we must rediscover faith in humanity and focus on building trustworthy, life-affirming relationships within human-scale ecologies of care.

Being human

Framing evolutionary processes in terms of collaborative niche construction instead of competition is grounded in what we know about the collaborative tendencies of human toddlers.

The notion of life as a competitive game only found its way into the science of biology by interpreting Darwin’s theory of evolution through the cultural lens of capitalism. The complementary perspective of life and evolution as a cooperative game as described by Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin in Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902) was largely ignored in so-called “developed” capitalist societies throughout most of the 20th century.

Through the lenses of evolutionary biology and cultural evolution, small groups of 20 to 100 people are the primary organisms within human society – in contrast to individuals, corporations, and nation states. The implications for our civilisation are profound.

Humanity is experiencing a phase transition that is catalysed by a combination of new communication technologies, toxic levels of social inequalities, and existential crises. It is time to put ubiquitous global digital connectivity to good use, to curate and share the lessons from marginalised perspectives, and to reflect critically on the human evolutionary journey and on the possibilities and limitations of human agency.

In the book The Beauty of Collaboration at Human Scale I argue that becoming conscious of human cognitive and emotional limits, and recognising that these limits are just as real, immutable, and relevant for our survival as the laws of physics may allow us to embark on a path of radical energy descent.

The journey of exponentially accelerating cultural evolution presented in this book covers several hundred thousand years, from the origins of humans right up to the latest significant developments in the early 21st century, as outlined in this article. I wrote this book to equip communities and individuals with conceptual tools to create good companies that are capable of pumping value from a dying ideological system into an emerging world.

Lulu (paperback)
AutCollab (ebook)

Being part of a healthy cultural organism

The human capacity for language would not have given us any adaptive ecological advantage if it did not primarily serve the purpose of improving our ability to understand, trust, and rely on each other, such that every human in a cultural organism to some extent contributes unique capabilities and lived experiences to the cultural organism.

Healthy cultural organisms do not consist of:

• Isolated individuals competing against each other
• Atomised nuclear families
• Incomprehensibly complex groups and institutions

In fact, the relational nature of the big cycle of life is obscured as long as long as we attempt to define cultural organisms as groups of people or even groups of living beings beyond the human. The very notion of groups of living beings makes no sense.

Humans and all other conscious beings make sense of the world in entirely relational terms. If we care to pay attention, we even relate to the food we eat and to many things that in the Western Educated Industrialised Rich Democratic (WEIRD) world are not considered to be alive. The extent to which we feel healthy, well, and alive is a direct reflection of the health and aliveness in all our relationships, and the extent to which we are able to minimise cognitive dissonance across all our relationships.

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 are closely aligned with the values of those we engage with on a daily basis. In an unhealthy ecology of care, our values may 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.

Appreciating the timeless patterns of human limitations

Our society has been constructed such that certain forms of exploitation are deemed acceptable / legal / necessary and such that other forms of bullying are deemed as unacceptable and illegal. Upon closer examination the boundary is an arbitrary one.

Laws and social norms in industrialised societies are shaped by the metaphor of society as a factory and the metaphor of people as machines more than most people realise.

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.

In the digital technoverse, biological life is perceived as becoming irrelevant. The unhelpful industrialised metaphor of “human biological machines” confuses first-order effects (the innate human inclination towards mutual aid and collaborative niche construction) with second-order effects (culturally transmitted “normalisation” of social power gradients).

Specifically, all societies that construct money as interest bearing debt and endow money with a quasi-ubiquitous fungibility to enable economic activity rely on the following four economic drivers or ways of “making money”:

1. Creation and lending of money for a return on investment: We use interest-bearing debt issued out of thin air by banks to prime the economic pump, and to provide professional bankers with a reliable source of significant income.
2. Speculation with land and real estate, and allowing people to inherit money: This enables people to “make” more money through lending for a return on investment, similar to banks, only that the means of individuals are more limited.
3. Hierarchical structures of organisations that offer extreme monetary rewards at the top: This encourages people to systematically take credit for the work of others to get to the top.
4. Creation of pyramid schemes that allow people to “extract value” from the work of others: This endorses and encourages harmful behaviours which benefit the individual over the group.

The common theme across these economic drivers is the willingness to exploit other people for personal gain, including the audacity to take personal credit for the results of others or for the results achieved as part of a team. Such exploitative interdependencies between people are considered “normal”, and bizarrely, we consider anyone who is able to survive comfortably by extracting money from other people as “independent”.

The four ways of making money are justified by a myth of meritocracy and circular reasoning – that people with a lot of money have “earned” the money and are entitled to a “fair” return on investment to cover their “risk” when lending some of it to others.

Realistic paths to “success” involve career climbing in hierarchical organisations or the related option of the creating and running a more or less legal pyramid scheme.

People with an intact moral compass tend to learn the hard way that all their attempts of investment, running charities or entrepreneurship only strengthen the status quo and amplify the economic inequalities. It is easy to see that honest people, and especially Autistic people, are systematically disabled in modern society, economically as well as socially, as many social norms are adaptations to the dominant economic paradigm.

Autistic people continuously work at the edge of their performance limit, which is often much higher than what non-autistic people are capable of sustaining, whilst not making a fuss about it. This invites exploitation. The social model of disability explains two of the most disabling aspects of being Autistic. To a significant extent Autistic experience can be described in terms of the downstream effects of:

1. A much reduced capacity to maintain cognitive dissonance, including the inability to maintain hidden agendas over extended periods.
2. Hypersensitivities, including in the social realm.

We find ourselves in a hypernormative global civilisation, with an anthropocentric performance-oriented culture and deep hierarchical structures of social power. It is revealing that the English language uses one word – perform – to refer to two different actions:

1. To begin and carry through to completion; do. To take action in accordance with the requirements of; fulfill.
2. To enact (a feat or role) before an audience.

The more competitive social power games a society allows, the more the meanings of these concepts converge. Performance becomes an obsession to conform to externally evaluated criteria.

In a highly competitive social environment in which some people are celebrated in terms of their “net worth”, and in which more and more experiences are commodified, mediated by purchasing power, life is no longer experienced as an ecological process, it is transformed into a performance before an audience that is measured and rated according to social expectations that are increasingly codified in and evaluated by abstract algorithms.

The conception of “intelligence” baked into Western culture and orthodox economic ideology is anaemic.

“I do believe we have to start thinking imaginatively about systems that are fundamentally differently organized. Shifts do happen in history. We’ve been taught for the last 30 to 40 years that imagination has no place in politics or economics, but that, too, is bullshit. I think we need a rebellion of what I call the “caring class,” people who care about others and justice. We need to think about how to create a new social movement and change what we value in our work and lives. People have a sense of what makes a job worthwhile; otherwise, they wouldn’t realize that what they’re doing now is bullshit. So we need to give this more articulation, and we need to unite with other people who want the same things. That’s a political project we can all get behind.

– David Graeber

Denying the timeless patterns of human limitations

Adam Becker, who has written a good book on the way engineering is practiced today, sums up the overall culture as: “Shut up and calculate!” This attitude to technology design has become accepted practice in most domains of engineering, and especially in the domains of machine learning, finance, and financial engineering. This is a culture of normalised denial.

Gary Stevenson does an excellent job of explaining the systemic nature and the lived reality of wealth inequality and social power gradients:

1. What is wealth? – Gary Stevenson
2. What is wealth inequality? – Gary Stevenson

The normalisation of the harm caused by social power gradients and powered-up relationships is the terminal disease that plagues all empires. Since we live in the context of the convulsions of dying empires, it is important to understand the cultural dynamics that are unfolding.

Social power differentials have a strong addictive potential for those who the system enables to wield social power over others. Wielding power via asset ownership is especially addictive and dangerous, since the power wielded is often indirect. Often the asset owner is insulated from the consequences for those at the receiving end of power by several levels of indirection, making it easier for the asset owner to remain in denial.

In the discipline of economics denial and obscuring harm is institutionalised and legitimised by refering to harm as “insignificant externalities”.

Addressing wealth inequality is not enough to heal all the human and non-human suffering caused by the energy and resource intensive ways of life that have been enabled by the exploitation of fossil fuels.

Eliminating wealth inequality without a fundamental shift in our values and in the cultural practices that define our daily lives, without a radical reduction in consumption and a radical shift in the ways that we relate to the living world will not reverse ecological overshoot and the sixth mass extinction.

We are currently using nature 1.7 times faster than our planet’s ecosystems can regenerate.

Even slowing down busyness significantly will not be enough. An equal distribution of wealth in an energy hungry materialistic consumer society will still wreck the planet.

The modern addiction to convenience and consumption comes in many different flavours. More is always better. Quantity is what counts. Quantity can be commoditised. Quantity can be sold as progress. Quality is systematically discounted by the religion of the invisible hand. Enough is no longer part of the Western Educated Industrialised Rich Democratic (WEIRD) vocabulary. The most obvious candidates for commodification and addiction:

• Material consumption
• Work
• Substances and foods
• Sex
• Gambling
• Entertainment, including “news”

The not-so-invisible hand is explicitly involved in ensuring that all these aspects of modern life are packaged in formats that maximise addictive potential.

This civilisation is finished. Rather than playing around with yet another “better” configuration of powered-up institutions, perhaps we are better served by practicing de-powered dialogue, and by learning how to de-power all our relationships – without asking any so-called authority for permission. The revolution will not be nudged!

Living in a sick, addicted culture

In our hypernormative society neurodivergence takes on a political dimension. Framing neurodivergence as pathological allows ideas from neurodivergent people to be dismissed as insignificant – simply because they are ideologically inconvenient.

In an interview a few years ago George Lakoff mentions his experience with John Nash, pointing out that John Nash had been working on co-operative game theory, and that this was a major reason for him being sidelined and locked up in a psychiatric institution.

I have been co-creating and working with formal and informal models of human collaboration in a broad range of domains for over thirty years. All along, the market based competitive models used by economists never made any sense to me, as they assume a level of cruelty and lack of compassion beyond what I could imagine. Developing and applying competitive models of human “collaboration”, i.e. “shutting up and calculating” would literally hurt my brain.

For a long time I did not realise the extent to which homo economicus acts as a very effective filter that guarantees that only adequately indoctrinated and compliant disciples of the god of the invisible hand gravitate to positions of power. Homo economicus has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, it is a collective hypernormative cultural choice, not a law of nature. The modern play book of anthropocentric civilisation building rests on the following frames:

1. All of life is a competition, which is framed as evolution.
2. Humans are declared to be superior to all other life forms, therefore we are declared to be more competitive, i.e. more evolved, which is framed as intelligence.
3. For human groups larger than a household to collaborate, it is essential to control human behaviours by constructing hierarchically structured abstract human institutions with coercive powers, which are framed as authorities.
4. Anthropocentric hierarchical structures of coercive powers and addictions to exercising such powers are justified by framing them as meritocracies – entitling small elites to make decisions that affect many thousands, millions, or billions of people and other living beings.
5. Effective coercive control over humans and all other living beings is deemed to be desirable – it is framed as progress.
6. Within the anthropocentric frame of progress, the right to earn a living, i.e. the right to exist, is framed as the freedom to submit to the authority of powered-up institutions, and in return being able to meet our emotional and bodily needs by choosing options from menus pre-configured by the institutional landscape.
7. The option to choose specific members from the elite class to head some of the pyramids of institutionalised social power is framed as democracy.
8. The option to establish non-democratic powered-up institutions, and to profit from such pyramid schemes at the expense of others is framed as the god of the invisible hand of the market.
9. The busyness, stress, addictions, energy use, waste, and ecological harm generated by the freedom to submit to authorities and consume from pre-configured menus is framed as economic performance.
10. The refusal to submit to authorities and consume from pre-configured menus is framed as being uncivilised, underdeveloped, primitive, or illegal.

What could possibly go wrong?

The first element in the stack of ten anthropocentric frames above is the product of the cultural bias of the religion of economics.

The innate collaborative tendencies of human toddlers that have not yet been fully socialised contradict the assumptions baked into homo economics. Replacing homo economicus with what we now understand about the human species radically transforms all the frames for understanding cultural evolution. A frame of collaborative niche construction allows human potential to contribute to rather than extract from the living planet.

A production/consumption paradigm for what an economy is is a guarantee for ultimately destroying the planet and each other. Even when you talk about degrowth, if you’re working within that paradigm, you’re essentially doomed. We need to break away from that paradigm entirely. Care and freedom on the other hand are things you can increase as much as you like without damaging anything. So we need to think: what are ways that we need to care for each other that will make each other more free? And who’re the people who are providing that care? And how can they be compensated themselves with greater freedom? To do that we need to like, actually scrap almost all of the discipline of economics as it currently exists.

We’re actually just starting to think about this. Economics as it currently exists is based on assumptions of human nature that we now know to be wrong. There have been actual empirical tests of the basic sort of fundamental assumptions of the maximizing individual that economic theory is based on, and it turns out that they’re not true. It tells you something about the role of economics that this has had almost no effect on economic teaching whatsoever. They don’t really care that it’s not true.

But one of the things that we have discovered, which is quite interesting, is that human beings have a psychological need to be cared for, but they have an even greater psychological need to care for others, or to care for something. If you don’t have that you basically fall apart. It’s why old people get dogs. We don’t just care for each other because we need to maintain each other’s lives and freedoms, but our own psychological happiness is based on being able to care for something or someone. 

– David Graeber, From Managerial Feudalism to the Revolt of the Caring Classes, 2019

Being alive

Humans have only survived in the face of much stronger top predators in various ecosystems by being able to collaborate, and by using symbolic language to better understand each other’s intentions and to coordinate our actions.

Yes, eventually we displaced the top predators in all ecosystems, and we became the most prolific primate on the planet. But this would have been completely impossible if symbolic language had evolved primarily to allow us to engage in fierce competition with each other, and to deceive each other.

To better communicate how all these topics fit together, I have embarked on another book curation and distillation project. The overarching theme could be described as ‘The psychology of human scale ecologies beyond the human’, but I also want to highlight the key element that holds together all the threads, which has been systematically eroded in Westernised societies: the notion of trust, including the role of trustworthy, sacred relationships within the context of human scale ecologies of care beyond the human, resulting in the working title ‘Trust in Human Scale : Ecologies of care beyond the human’.

The biological evolutionary heritage of our capacity for culture and symbolic thought and language is directly linked to – and dependent – on our ability to fully trust each other in life and death situations.

Generalising to an ecological context beyond the human, Janine Benyus summarises the evolutionary process of life as follows:

In the natural world the definition of success is the continuity of life. You keep yourself alive and you keep your offspring alive. That’s success, but it’s not the offspring in this generation. Success is keeping your offspring alive 10 000 generations and more, and that presents a conundrum, because you cannot, you’re not going to be there.

What life has learned: To take care of your offspring 10 000 generations from now. So what organisms have learned to do is to take care of the place that’s going to take care of their offspring. Life has learned to create conditions conducive to life, and that’s really the magic heart of it.

Life creates conditions conducive to life.

– Janine Benyus

The book will build on the foundations laid in the book on the beauty of collaboration at human scale that I collated in 2021, covering the scope outlined in the sections below.

Being part of the living planet

There is no shortage of small human scale initiatives that re-conceptualise human societies in comprehensible, compassionate, and life affirming ways.

The world in reality is a beautifully interconnected world, and it’s interconnected through many many layers. It’s interconnected through consciousness, which is why we are spiritual beings in human form. But the plants outside my window are spiritual beings in plant form. But the plant of the lychee is in lychee form, and the tree of the mango is in mango form. They are just different expressions of one spiritual interconnected consciousness in the world.

I’ve studied quantum theory. We realised that the particles in the world are really not the basic reality. The basic reality is potential and energy, and it’s only when you try and measure it, then it shows up as a particle, or it shows up as a wave, but the reality really is that which connects, the non-separability problem. My PhD thesis was on non-separation, non-locality, and quantum theory. We knew [this] 100 years ago in physics, and yet an obsolete physics of more than 100 years ago is being used to shape and and divide a very interconnected world. So dualism today is not just epistemologically so wrong, it is not just ontologically so wrong, it is spiritually just not the right way to think of the world, but it is now becoming a threat to human life, preventing people from living with each other in diversity with love. And that’s why we have to spread the message of non-dualism, of interconnectedness, of oneness through love, and we have to be the practice...

All cultures had economies but it wasn’t the first organising principle, it was a byproduct of good living… Where did that wealth come from? It was an economy, but it was not an economy of extraction. It was not an economy of domination, it was an economy of living. If you go to the roots of the word economy, economy according to Aristotle is the art of living. Our civilisation has very deep spiritual foundations, and through spirituality you know that the diversity in the world is really different expressions of the same oneness… Let all the beings flourish…

– Vandana Shiva

Collectively we can tap into a wealth of knowledge and timeless indigenous wisdom.

Having faith in the living planet

Lived experience in nurturing and maintaining mutual trust at human scale is the key ingredient for being at ease in a seemingly unpredictable world. Being able to rely on each other is at the core of the evolutionary heritage of our species.

Mutual trust is a biophilic ecological phenomenon of emergent local predictability that is not limited to humans. In a dynamic ecological context, enduring relationships of mutual trust constitute the ingredients of a life affirming ecology of care that is integrated into the regenerative cyclical flow of life.

Mutual trust is the priceless currency of living systems.

Healing

Healing starts with rediscovering our faith in humanity. The sacred cycle of life includes the joy of birth, the art of living well, and the process of dying in good company, and thereby giving back nutrients to the living planet.

The neurodiversity, disability, and indigenous rights movements are part of the cultural immune system of human societies, responding to the mechanistic, hypercompetitive, and rule based approach to social arrangements imposed by the learning disabled mono-cult with a holistic social justice approach.

We heal by following our heart. We reduce cognitive dissonance by being human – by sobering up, by rejecting the life denying mono-cult, by seeing the beauty in all living beings.

Along the way, instead of abusing the discipline of mathematics to shut people up, and to calculate ever more perverse ways of out-competing each other, we can rediscover and revive the much older framing of mathematics as the beautiful art of explanation, within a collaborative frame of omni-directional learning. Below is a good example, also highlighting the inherently collaborative nature of mathematical discovery.

Whether A♾tistic dreamers are able to establish alternative ecologies of care beyond the human is no longer up for debate. We have nothing to lose. We deeply appreciate the wonder of life, and we clearly see the global mono-cult for what it is. 

We are A♾tistic. We are fully human. We are alive.

Further reading on WEIRD cultural bias

1. Sowing the seeds for ecological and intersectional communal wellbeing
2. Autistic people are not for sale
3. The massive cognitive and emotional blind spot at the core of modernity
4. Understanding power and de-powering
5. Coherent theories of human ways of being
6. From pseudo-philosophical psychiatrists to openly Autistic culture
7. Collaborative niche construction
8. The continuously shifting justifications for pathologising non-conformists
9. Include all Conversion Therapies in Legislative Ban
10. The purpose of human cultures
11. Reclaiming the essence of humanity
12. Replacing control with ecologies of care
13. Autistic people – The cultural immune system of human societies
14. Active disablement of minorities

Many scientists don’t acknowledge the extent to which their disciplinary paradigms are influenced by the cultural frames of the colonial era. The so-called mental health crisis is a symptom of a terminally diseased institutional landscape. Neurodiversity and disability activists have been collaborating on coherent theories of human ways of being. Collaborative niche construction is the evolutionary process of reducing cognitive dissonance.

Completely normal ways of feeling unwell and distressed

The many ways in which atomised nuclear families depend on abstract institutions is considered normal, and all those who depend on assistance from others in unusual ways are pathologised.

The following interview with Eva Henje conducted by our friends at Local Futures outlines the alienating and dehumanising social experiences created by the global mono-cult that defines the institutional landscape that surrounds us:

Social power can be understood as the privilege of not needing to learn.

As we live through the current human predicament we are well advised to understand capitalism as a collective learning disability that actively contributes to human and non-human suffering. Michael Guilding offers a coherent and comprehensive explanation of how modern society and all earlier powered-up empires are based on the systematic hijacking of the evolved human fear response.

Michael Guilding’s explanation also reminds me of what a capitalist/investor once explained to me as “normal” or “human nature”, i.e. that people are driven exclusively by two forces: fear and greed. I suspect that this sad attitude is quite common amongst those who have navigated themselves into positions of social power within the mono-cult.

Traumatised populations driven by fear and greed are the culmination of the industrial factory model of society. This is a world of programmable “human biological machines” – the ultimate negation of the wonder of life.

Internalised ableism in the science of biology

The normalisation of internalised ableism runs deep.

Even well known biologists perpetuate the unhelpful industrialised metaphor of “human biological machines”, confusing first-order effects (the innate human inclination towards mutual aid and collaborative niche construction) with second-order effects (culturally transmitted “normalisation” of social power gradients), which are only present in dehumanising societies that are deeply troubled and sick.

In species with complex cultures, including whales, elephants, and humans, the naive distinction between two evolutionary survival strategies summarised below highlights the limitations of the paradigm used by some biologists and ecologists:

r-selection: On one extreme are the species that are highly r-selected. r is for reproduction. Such a species puts only a small investment of resources into each offspring, but produces many such low effort babies. Such species are also generally not very invested in protecting or rearing these young. Often, the eggs are fertilized and then dispersed. The benefit of this strategy is that if resources are limited or unpredictable, you can still produce some young. However, each of these young has a high probability of mortality, and does not benefit from the protection or nurturing of a caring parent or parents. r-selected babies grow rapidly, and tend to be found in less competitive, low quality environments. Although not always the case, r-selection is more common among smaller animals with shorter lifespans and, frequently, non-overlapping generations, such as fish or insects. The young tend to be precocial (rapidly maturing) and develop early independence.

K-selection: On the other extreme are species that are highly K-selected. K refers to the carrying capacity, and means that the babies are entering a competitive world, in a population at or near its carrying capacity. K-selected reproductive strategies tend towards heavy investment in each offspring, are more common in long-lived organisms, with a longer period of maturation to adulthood, heavy parental care and nurturing, often a period of teaching the young, and with fierce protection of the babies by the parents. K-selected species produce offspring that each have a higher probability of survival to maturity. Although not always the case, K-selection is more common in larger animals, like whales or elephants, with longer lifespans and overlapping generations. The young tend to be altricial (immature, requiring extensive care).

It is fascinating that the above definition refers to whales and elephants as examples of ‘K-selection’ without mentioning that these two species, not unlike humans, have an advanced capacity for culture, including the capacity for transmitting cultural norms across generations. The assertion that in such species “babies are entering a competitive world” is a projection of Western Educated Industrialised Rich Democratic (WEIRD) cultural bias onto other species. To date no one has been able to ask whales or elephants about whether they experience the world as competitive or collaborative, and even much less so to receive an answer to this question!

Only culturally well adjusted people in hierarchically structured empires understand the entire living world as inherently and primarily competitive.

Around the margins of empires, we find no shortage of examples of egalitarian collaborative cultural environments, even though in our current time, the majority of humans do find themselves trapped in a social landscape of powered-up institutions.

Many scientists don’t acknowledge the extent to which their disciplinary paradigms are influenced by the cultural frames of the colonial era. The so-called mental health crisis is a symptom of a terminally diseased institutional landscape. Vandana Shiva correctly identifies capitalist patriarchy as the cultural disease that is framing the entire living world as inherently and primarily competitive.

Reframing life in terms of collaborative niche construction

In order to appreciate the significant role that culture can play as part of evolutionary processes of gene-culture co-evolution, and to arrive at a deeper understanding of evolutionary processes, we must replace the misguided notion of K-selection.

At the very least, a less culturally biased and more nuanced understanding needs to distinguish between:

c-selection: On the one extreme are species with a capacity for culture that are highly c-selected. c is for compliance. Such a species puts only a small if any investment of resources into the development of new cultural knowledge and wisdom, and instead prioritises the production of adults that are well adjusted to the established culture. Such species are generally not very invested in protecting or rearing babies that do not seem to fit into the established cultural milieu. Often, the young are indoctrinated and expected to fend for themselves within a framework of abstract cultural institutions. The benefit of this strategy is that the emotional load of caregivers is significantly reduced, and everyone is encouraged to still produce some young, even if ecological conditions are deteriorating. However, each of these young has a high probability of mental unwellness and mortality, and does not benefit from the protection or nurturing of a caring parent or parents. Offspring in c-selected cultural species grow into replaceable, culturally well adjusted members of society, and tend to be found in ecologically degraded environments. Although not always the case, c-selection is more common in large scale societies, such as modern industrialised societies. The young are expected to become fully independent individual members of society.

C-selection: On the other extreme are species with a capacity for culture that are highly C-selected. C refers to Culturally adaptive, and means that the babies are entering a culturally diverse world, in a population at or near its local carrying capacity. C-selected reproductive strategies tend towards heavy investment in very few offspring, and tend welcome the discovery of new cultural knowledge and wisdom. Such species are generally invested in protecting or rearing all babies, even those that do not seem to fit into the established cultural milieu. C-selected cultural species encourage offspring to learn from the established cultural milieu, but even more so, from the ecological environment, and as a result have a higher probability of survival to maturity in times of rapid ecological changes. Although not always the case, C-selection is more common in small scale societies, like whales or human hunter gatherers. The curiosity of the young is nurtured in a diverse relational ecology of care, and the young are encouraged to engage in collaborative niche construction.

A framing of evolutionary processes that includes r-selection, c-selection, as well as C-selection strategies offers a more coherent explanation for the observed diversity within and between cultural species. The proposed ‘rcC-selection paradigm’ for evolutionary processes also encourages biological scientists to acknowledge that a purely biological and genetic categorisation of species demotes all the social sciences and all so-called non-scientific ways of relating to the world to being less “significant” for understanding the living world.

The naive ‘rK-selection paradigm’ obscures a [hypernormative] cultural bias against biological diversity, and especially against human cultural diversity. In the talk referenced above, Vandana Shiva reaches the same conclusion. She points out that the life denying ideology of capitalist patriarchy can be traced back to Francis Bacon, the father of Western science, to the British men who formed the East India Company, and to Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus, and that this shaped the cultural milieu in which Charles Darwin grew up.

In species with a capacity for complex culture, ecologically stable environments with abundant sources of food can incrementally tip the balance towards c-selection over the course of multiple generations. But this strategy only works as long as the environment remains stable. c-selection can fail rapidly and abruptly if the environment becomes less predictable. Conversely, highly dynamic and unpredictable environments are favourable to C-selection strategies.

The human capacity for language and cultural transmission over many generations, together with what we know from archaeological and anthropological research, as well as from more recent written historic accounts, tells us that human societies exist on a spectrum of C-selection and c-selection strategies.

C-selection strategies, i.e. adaptive cultures, have allowed humans to survive through ice ages, and may be the key factor that has assisted humans in displacing other primates in most bioregional ecosystems. Conversely, the ability to adopt c-selection strategies, i.e. hypernormative cultures, have enabled humans to build empires and large scale societies in which human cognitive capacity is diverted away from communal survival, and towards exploitation of abundant resources and social competition.

The rich diversity of small scale cultures, including the visual symbolic representations and cultural values that survived and thrived in the Australian continent for 65,000 years, points us towards the collective creative human potential and towards the deep ecological understanding that has been systematically obliterated and suppressed by capitalist patriarchy.

The big cycle of life

In a dynamic ecological context, enduring relationships of mutual trust are not only more stable than abstract indicators of social status, they also constitute the ingredients of a life affirming ecology of care that is integrated into the regenerative cyclical flow of life.

Mutual trust is the priceless currency of living systems.

The sacred cycle of life includes the joy of birth, the art of living well, and the process of dying and nurturing the living planet in good company.

In contrast to the global mono-cult of capitalist patriarchy, this timeless wisdom is well understood within the Hindu, Buddhist, and Daoist philosophical and spiritual traditions. Hindu cosmology for example conceptualises the entire cosmos and all of human history terms of cyclic ages, i.e. in terms of four ‘Yuga Cycles’, which is in stark contrast to the anthropocentric WEIRD conception of human history as a linear arc of progress, perhaps punctuated by a few setbacks along the way, to accentuate the framing of life as a competitive struggle.

The framing of life in terms of collaborative niche construction is much more compatible with Eastern traditions,

with Joseph Tainter’s pioneering analysis of patterns of civilisational collapse, and with indigenous cultures, which all understand the planet as a regenerative system of relationships between living entities.

All cultural species that maintain dominance hierarchies and abstract forms of social status are diverting energy from the regenerative cyclical flow of life towards head-to-head in-group competition and the suppression of diversity.

The dying process of terminally diseased institutions is only a perceived disaster from the viewpoint of elites who are addicted to social power, and from the viewpoint of the abstract institutions that represent these elites.

Omni-directional sensing and learning

“Collapse” of spurious cultural complexity is a liberating experience for most.

Over the course of the last 25 years, as part of a concerted effort of exposing the internalised ableism that is keeping entire societies locked into suicidal paradigmatic inertia, neurodiversity and disability activists have been collaborating on coherent theories of human ways of being. Cultures in which it is a taboo to draw attention to culturally prescribed cognitive dissonance are life denying cultures. Deeply troubled cultures.

Most people in Westernised cultures are not driven by greed, but the toxic cultural environment ensures that the vast majority is driven by fear. Those who find the courage to acknowledge their fears are tortured by cognitive dissonance.

Lived experiences from our participatory research:

What is the biggest source of cognitive dissonance in your life?

I feel like I don’t deserve to be treated in the way in which I’d treat other people. I often help strangers but would feel distressed if one offered to help me (and would politely turn down the offer of help, most likely). I would be unable to fire someone due to economic reasons, but if I was fired for those same reasons, I’d accept it and would feel sad and scared, but that it’s okay for me to be treated that way. Even when I do help people, I worry that I do it for the “wrong” reasons, so I didn’t know how to answer some questions. For example, I give money to homeless people and chat with them. I “feel really good” about this because I know that the money means they might be able to afford something they need, and that being spoken to is likely at least a bit humanising in a world which dehumanises them. Despite this, when I give money and chat to homeless people, I beat myself up after and tell myself that I’m only doing it because I’m virtue signalling or want to feel good about myself, even if I know deep down I do it because I want to be helpful and want people to be safe and feel cared for. Even if I did do it to feel good about myself, then at least that person would have some money they probably need. It’s hard to remember that, though. Even writing this is uncomfortable, as my negative self talk says that I’m only writing it to parade how “good” I think I am.

Wealth inequality and class differences that have no logical justification, having to accept that poor people suffering is normal even when it’s entirely avoidable.

Society expects that I should be able to ask for help whenever things get a little difficult but asking for help leaves me feeling very very unsafe and likely to be betrayed and have my request used against me as a weakness.

In healthy cultures our capacity to detect cognitive dissonance catalyses collaborative niche construction, and contributes to the co-creation of ecologies of care.

Collaborative niche construction is the evolutionary process of reducing cognitive dissonance, a process of omni-directional sensing and learning, which can only emerge in an adequately de-powered, non-overwhelming, and life affirming, i.e. holotropic and syntropic environment.

In recent years I have become increasingly intrigued by ai (shorthand for ant intelligence) as opposed to the hype of AI. ai is an awesome form of externalised collective intelligence beyond human comprehension. Some ant species can leave pheromone trails that can last for days – which I can confirm from personal experience, while others produce a pheromone trail that only lasts 10 minutes. Unintentional experiments from my kitchen reveal that once an ant has located a food source, that it only takes a few hours for a fully functional ai food logistics system to become established. On this planet ai goes a long way to ensuring that no food goes to waste. We could learn from that.

It is worthwhile listening to Bayo Akomolafe. I think he seriously underestimates ai, but he does a wonderful job of making Autistic ways of being and relating accessible to a neuronormative audience.

Taking stock

This year (2024), August 1st was Earth Overshoot Day, announced by the Global Footprint Network.

This is the date when humanity’s demand on natural resources exceeds Earth’s capacity to regenerate them in a given year. We are currently using nature 1.7 times faster than our planet’s ecosystems can regenerate. The Ecological Footprint Calculator is a useful tool for exploring our own ecological footprint and the huge disparities between the huge footprints of elites and the vastly smaller footprints of the majority of humans.

Daoist philosophers have warned humans for over 2,500 years that all forms of social power over others corrupts. Ignoring this warning has led to the current human predicament.

Rather than playing around with yet another “better” configuration of powered-up institutions, perhaps we are better served by practicing de-powered dialogue, and by learning how to de-power all our relationships – without asking any so-called authority for permission. The revolution will not be nudged!

Towards ecological wellbeing

Becoming conscious of human cognitive and emotional limits, and recognising that these limits are just as real, immutable, and relevant for our survival as the laws of physics may help us to fully appreciate the wonder of life.

Creating light, where all you could see is darkness.

– Sofía Gómez Uribe

There is no shortage of human scale initiatives that re-conceptualise human societies in comprehensible, compassionate, and life affirming ways. Collectively we can tap into a wealth of knowledge and timeless indigenous wisdom.

We need commitment, we need community. We need to create spaces of trust. But for that, there’s tremendous work that we need to be doing. But I don’t think that any of that work will be possible, should we not have that commitment–that commitment that no matter how challenging and tremendously difficult it will be to reckon with these narratives and to dismantle these narratives. Because seeing the horror in the eye of all these narratives that we live by comes with tremendous understanding. It will leave us very fragile, very vulnerable, and most, of course, are not willing to do that, because we don’t feel safe. But if we are able to stand the heat and create these spaces, if we commit to do this kind of work for the benefit of the planet, then we may be able to learn that we can fly.

– Yuria Celidwen

… and you can only do it with the help of friends who keep you safe. I don’t have a death wish, I have a depth wish.

– Stig Pryds

We are currently co-creating a comprehensive support model for Autists and otherwise neurodivergent and intersectionally marginalised people that is grounded in our collective lived experience, informed by what we are learning from the results of our ongoing participatory research.