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There is an urgent need to catalyse Autistic collaboration and co-create healthy Autistic, Artistic, and otherwise neurodivergent whānau all over the world. Autists depend on assistance from others in ways that differ from the cultural norm – and that is pathologised in hypernormative societies. However, the many ways in which non-autistic people depend on others is considered “normal”. The endless chains of trauma must be broken. 

Surviving on the edges of modern society is an Art. The Arts and regular immersion in genuinely safe Open Spaces help us imagine and co-create ecologies of care in which care and mutual aid are the primary values. Healthy Artistic and Autistic life paths by necessity differ from “normality”.

It is time to fully recognise the level of trauma amongst the growing numbers of marginalised people, and especially intersectionally marginalised people.

A♾tistic : Autistic, Artistic, and other ways of being that deviate from hypernormativity. 

The Arts are also an essential part of education. Healthy A♾tistic life paths by necessity differ from WEIRD normality. This must be fully acknowledged as part of any Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) approach that claims to respect the human rights of marginalised people.

Maybe A♾tistic should be pronounced Awetistic, which is already familiar to Autists?

With the expanded definition in place, which also nicely integrates the diversity semantics of the infinity symbol of the ♾ neurodiversity movement, we can recognise the ecological significance of A♾tistic humans that co-create A♾tistic cultures and A♾tistic friendly cultures. Only when we get to the point where everyone recognises that at some level they have an A♾tistic side, only then no one is left behind. Until then, WEIRD society is crippled by internalised ableism.

Please note that I am not saying that “everyone is a little bit Autistic”! What I am saying is that deep down everyone has a creative artistic side, and that this is the aspect of humanity that is systematically repressed and oppressed in WEIRD societies, and is replaced by shallow performative forms of “creativity” – the kind of “creativity” that any decent so-called artificially intelligent system can mass produce.

We need to recognize and celebrate our many strengths and talents that may not be showcased in modern transactional Western workplaces, competitive classrooms, and hypernormative nuclear family environments. Such unsafe environments punish us for our creativity, ability to think outside-the-box, solve problems with unusual skills, unique insights, and perspectives, as well as our perseverance and ability to collaborate in innovative un-orthodox ways. In mainstream society people don’t understand how A♾tistic people support each other, love each other, and care for each other in ways that go far beyond the culturally impaired neuronormative imagination. 

There is the saying that “It takes a village to raise a child.” The A♾tistic translation of this saying is “For an A♾tistic person it takes an extended A♾tistic family to feel loved and alive.”

In the modern industrialised and post-industrialised world, most A♾tists are not born into healthy A♾tistic families. We have to co-create our families in our own space and time, where we can express our many feelings in our own unique ways. In a healthy culture A♾tistic children are assisted in co-creating their unique A♾tistic families, but in our “civilisation” this cultural knowledge has been lost and is suppressed.

A♾tistic people are not for sale

The actual effect of the myth of meritocracy, which is used to normalise and rationalise head to head competition, is a consistent bias to over-represent capabilities, and to actively avoid thinking about externalities.

This is familiar to anyone who has ever been exposed to advertising. The cult of busyness undermines attempts at creating a shared understanding at a very basic level. The collective effects at scale and over decades are disastrous. 

Especially Autistic people, but also many artists do not fare well in transactional, competitive, and hierarchically organised workplace environment.

W Edward Deming succinctly summarised the myth of meritocracy within competitive hierarchically organised workplaces:

“Pay for merit, pay for what you get, reward performance. Sounds great, can’t be done. Unfortunately it can not be done, on short range. After 10 years perhaps, 20 years, yes. The effect is devastating. People must have something to show, something to count. In other words, the merit system nourishes short-term performance. It annihilates long-term planning. It annihilates teamwork. People can not work together. To get promotion you’ve got to get ahead. By working with a team, you help other people. You may help yourself equally, but you don’t get ahead by being equal, you get ahead by being ahead. Produce something more, have more to show, more to count. Teamwork means work together, hear everybody’s ideas, fill in for other people’s weaknesses, acknowledge their strengths. Work together. This is impossible under the merit rating / review of performance system. People are afraid. They are in fear. They work in fear. They can not contribute to the company as they would wish to contribute. This holds at all levels. But there is something worse than all of that. When the annual ratings are given out, people are bitter. They can not understand why they are not rated high. And there is a good reason not to understand. Because I could show you with a bit of time that it is purely a lottery.” – W Edwards Deming (1984)

For Autists, beyond the toxic aspect of competition, which completely violates any sense of fairness, the sensory environment in many traditional workplaces can be pure hell. I hand over to Mica for an in-depth explanation:

Mica’s story is not exceptional. It is a good example of the ways in which Autistic people have to weave their lives in unconventional ways – the only ways that are viable and survivable for us. The unusual and unique niches that many of us end up co-creating are not the sad part. The sad part is the extent to which hypernormative society actively prevents us from carving our unique niches that meet our basic sensory, social, intellectual, and emotional needs.

For most of us, finding our niche, and reaching a point where this niche provides us with livelihood within the context of a safe and welcoming ecology of care, is a process that takes decades. Too many of us never reach the point where we get to feel a sense of belonging within a multi-dimensional ecological context that is part of the amazing big cycle of life on this planet – without being judged and dismissed.

A/Prof Gerald Roche has written an excellent article that explains what’s it like to be an Autistic worker in the neoliberal job market and how neoliberal work ways disables Autistic people based on first hand experiences, referencing the timely book Empire of Normality by Dr Robert Chapman.

What mainstream society has to realise, and what especially well meaning potential employers have to realise is that the talents and strengths of many A♾tistic people are not accessible by hiring us as employees or by hiring us as individual contractors. Most of the A♾tistic people with a few decades of life experience under their belt that I have met know their sensory, emotional, and ethical limits, and recoil at the idea of employment in a hierarchically organised and “managed” company. We have been there often enough, and via the Internet, we have now had over 25 years of time to compare notes globally. Thanks, but No Thanks!

Co-creating A♾tistic livelihoods within a toxic institutional landscape

If this article seems to paint a bleak picture, it is because given the current institutional landscape, and given the dominant social ideology that is relentlessly reinforced by mainstream media and corporate controlled social media, the outlook for humanity is indeed bleak – very bleak.

But the older A♾tistic people that are still around are still around because deep down we are optimists, because we have not completely lost the ability to appreciate the wonder of life. We have found some good A♾tistic company along the way, at least sporadically, and increasingly, on an ongoing basis. This rare good A♾tistic company, outside the toxic institutional landscape, is what keeps us alive. This is what Mica and Quinn talk about, this is what I write about, this is how the AutCollab Education Team collaborates, this is how S23M operates as a NeurodiVenture (a worker co-op) – this is A♾tistic culture.

This article is intended for younger A♾tists who may find themselves pressured to undertake employment within the established institutional landscape, for older A♾tists who may find themselves clinging to a job in a toxic environment for dear life, for isolated older A♾tists who have burned out in the complete absence of good company, and for employers who are genuinely prepared to listen – prepared to engage with A♾tists people in unorthodox ways, and ideally prepared to learn lessons from 12 years of operating A♾tistic worker co-ops.

The employers that will most likely relate to Autistic people will be small company owners – small by our standards in Aotearoa, often less than ten people, but definitely less than 100 people. All small company owners with an ethical conscience are familiar with the need to put the needs of customers and employees before their own needs, often on an ongoing basis – many have arrived at doing what they do because they are neurodivergent.

Ethical entrepreneurship is not about “success” by the standards of a toxic institutional landscape, it is about co-creating livelihoods in good company, it is about nurturing long-term trustworthy relationships with co-workers, with suppliers, and with customers, embedded within cosmolocal community, it is about co-creating comprehensible ecologies of care beyond the human, and it is about open collaboration at eye level at all times.

The Autistic Collaboration Trust in collaboration with S23M and the Design Justice Network assists organisations that are committed to providing an inclusive and culturally and psychologically safe workplace.

The A♾tistic Collaboration community grows organically, at human scale, at a human pace, one trusted relationship at a time, in the form of self-organising small groups that collaborate on specific initiatives, contributing to the wellbeing of Autistic and otherwise neurodivergent and intersectionally marginalised people.

The story of infinite economic growth and technological progress portrays a completely delusional and scientifically impossible world, which not only ignores biophysical limits, but also human cognitive and emotional limits. Nurturing the human capacity to extend trust to each other, and engaging in the big cycle of life as part of an ecology of care beyond the human is the biggest challenge of our times.

For an A♾tistic person the pathway towards good company is distinctly different from the life trajectory mapped out by the expectations of mainstream culture. The most appropriate pathway for an A♾tistic person depends significantly on the surrounding social environment and the stage of life.

Onwards!

A big shout out to A♾tist Daan Verhoeven and his friends, and their incredible work, which I think many Autists will be able to relate to!

After years of struggling with depression, what helped me the most was creating things. Of course I also have to make sure I exercise and eat healthy, but once I combined them all, I had a much better handle on how dark my moods get. And when I discussed that with friends, it turned out this was pretty universal. They might have different creative outlets than my photos and videos, but they all found that making something, anything, be it a new business or a new skill or a book, was vital to them feeling better.

One of those friends is Sofía Gómez Uribe, who in the last couple of years has not only found a whole new way to approach her sport, but she also set up a freediving school in Dominica, creating new opportunities for people to learn and stimulating the local economy. Plus she makes perfect bubble rings, which I thought would be a good way to visually explain the idea of how something we create grows and then in turn, helps to create us. How your changing perspective can guide you to not just see things in a new way, but make new things as well.

– Daan Verhoeven

Stig Pryds is a Danish record holding freediver. He was diagnosed with psoriatic arthritis in 2008, which disabled him so much that he lost his business. After 5 years of intense pain and increasing dependency on drugs, he decided to quit all drugs cold turkey, and find alternative ways to deal with his disease. He began practising yoga daily, changed his diet, and started practising freediving. This caused drastic changes: within months he could walk without a cane, and he could play with his two young daughters again.

Stig Pryds on the importance of slowing down, on safety, and on good company:

And most importantly, a Big Thank You to my small & uniquely amazing Autistic ecology of care and to the wider AutCollab community of supporters and allies!

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Over the last 5,000 years the ambiguities of linear written narratives and convenient interpretations have played a big role in amplifying social power gradients. The story of infinite economic growth and technological progress portrays a completely delusional and scientifically impossible world, which not only ignores biophysical limits, but also human cognitive and emotional limits. Nurturing the human capacity to extend trust to each other, and engaging in the big cycle of life as part of an ecology of care beyond the human is the biggest challenge of our times.

The institutions and accepted cultural practices of the modern world are traumatising the entire planet. The polycrisis, which is the modern human predicament that we are all living through, can be illustrated with three short cultural narratives:

1. A timely indigenous commentary on WEIRD culture from the US.
2. The effects of the one-dimensional “logic” of global capital can be understood by looking at the overall cultural and ecological impact on the small island nation of Nauru.
3. The effects of the arbitrary anthropocentric cut-off points of the bell curve in the social realm can also be understood by looking at the overall cultural and ecological impact on a small island nation such as Tuvalu.

These narratives illustrate the cognitive and emotional blindspots that are baked into “normality”.

The profound life destroying impact of the modern human obsession with measuring, and then reducing the dimensionality of all problem spaces to the one-dimensional metric of financial capital can hardly be overestimated. The classic novel Flatland comes to mind. Flatland illustrates the confusions and the loss of meaning created by reducing 4 dimensional spacetime to 2 spatial dimensions and the dimension of time, i.e. a reduction of a 4 dimensional problem space to 3 dimensions.

The semantic chemical building blocks of the biological world we inhabit contain thousands of dimensions. If we add emergent phenomena at larger levels of scale, we live in a world of millions and billions of semantic dimensions. We all have our own unique way of making sense of the world, from the perspective of the relational ecology of care that surrounds us.

And yet, we live in a world where human social affairs, across all levels of scale, are dominated by a one-dimensional metric. Some still recognise that there is “life out there” beyond finance, but our minds have been warped by the extensive exposure to a one-dimensional metric.

Language

Over the last 5,000 years, linear written language and convenient interpretation have played a big role in amplifying social power gradients.

In Aotearoa a group of Maori scholars have produced an excellent 400 page report, comparing the English and Maori version of the Treaty of Waitangi, meticulously uncovering all the linguistic techniques that were used by the British Crown to create and then maintain the illusion of a partnership between equals.

Written language is frequently used to distract from the ambiguities of linear narratives, creating wriggling room for convenient interpretations, especially when key details can be hidden by exploiting the semantic blind spots created by the translation between two very different languages.

Stepping back, looking across all empire building civilisations, the collective learning disability induced by powered-up social relationships can be traced to the following ways of systematically distorting and dismissing lived experiences:

• Oversimplification by reducing complex problem spaces to a much lower (one!) dimensional space. This is the commonality across all pyramidal systems of power – there is one perspective that dominates over all others.
• Inducing a systemic power differential by distorting the oversimplified one dimensional metric with the notion of “interest”. This is the religion of economics.
• Watering down the precautionary principle via cognitive blind spots created by the arbitrary “normalising” cut-off points of the bell curve in the social realm. Example: entire island nations completely get ignored until they are doomed. Their local existence is deemed “insignificant” in relation to what happens in the so-called “real”, i.e. the big “normative” world where all decisions are made. This is the scientism that is blooming in the era of big junk data.
• Systematically exploiting the ambiguities of linear narratives by nominating a convenient “authority” for interpretation. For a current example, we only need to look at the way Julian Assange is treated by the British Crown. I remember growing up in a world that had Soviet dissidents. This century the United States are producing American dissidents. Power always corrupts. The Anglosphere is “leading” the world in legal engineering and perception management.
• Systematically exploiting cognitive blind spots created by translations between different languages, again by nominating a convenient “authority” for interpretation. Aotearoa is a poster child for this approach. This goes hand in hand with implicit assumption that some languages are more “primitive” than others.
• A misguided focus on “winning” arguments rather than engaging in omni-directional learning to better understand each other. This is the bullying that is taught in busyness schools, i.e. the powered-up “art” of marketing, sales, and corporate power politics. The most honest conversation that I have had on this topic was with a former technology investor who describes busyness schools as “places that train people how to become a bad person”. My own attempts at educating MBA students in the neurodiversity paradigm were also disillusioning and traumatising.
• There may be further distorting factors that can’t be traced to a combination of the above. Your lived experience is much appreciated!

None of this is new. The Daoists knew as much from lived experiences with powered-up empires over 2,500 years ago. The elements above are the cultural foundation on top of which it becomes possible to establish a “science” of ABA, which deserves to be renamed to Applied Behaviourism and Arm twisting.

To make sense of the world, to stay tethered to human scale, to survive, to adapt, and to thrive together, the salient question in categorising beliefs is not the question of truth versus fiction, but the question of trustworthy versus not trustworthy. This in turn is a human scale context specific cultural question.

I want to focus on two interconnected cultural topics – imagination and trust. The way we approach these two topics shapes human lived experiences – and thus the kinds of cultural practices that will emerge and the cultural practices that will fade into the background over the coming decades, with implications for the amount of human and non-human suffering that is unfolding.

Imagination

Human imagination is an essential part of human life and human culture. Without it we would not be human.

The presentation The Truth About Fiction – Biological Reality & Imaginary Lives by Joseph Carroll is a useful tool for a WEIRD audience, to remind culturally well adapted people that human imagination is an essential part of human culture.

If our imagination is limited to cartoon characters and entertainment that mimics our current culture or runs through dystopian scenarios, then that is the contracted sphere of discourse and the self fulfilling prophecy of denial and despair in which we exist and navigate into the future.

What can expand our sphere of discourse is mutual trust, so that we can jointly imagine a radically different future that does not violate biophysical limits.

If we focus our imagination on minimising the human and non-human suffering that lies ahead, without discounting the scientific facts about ecological overshoot, global inequities, rapid global heating, the material constraints we will hit within the coming decades, and the growing mental health crisis, then we can avoid the most dystopian scenarios.

In terms of overall philosophy, I am aligned with Vandana Shiva, trusting the collective intelligence of the living planet more than any human intelligence. This amounts to an explicit acknowledgement of human limitations, a commitment to strengthen our integration into local ecosystems, and a commitment to weakening our dependence on powered-up institutions such as capital, corporations, and national governments.

Looking ahead: At worst, we can hospice modernity on our way out over the next few generations. At best, after a period of population decline, radical energy descent, and co-ordinated retreat from uninhabitable parts of the planet, bringing human imagination back down to Earth may allow a smaller number of humans to develop a diverse ecology of gentler cosmolocal cultures that play a nurturing, life giving role within the planetary ecosystem.

A world where there is infinite economic growth, with no concern for biophysical limits nor for human cognitive and emotional limits, is a completely delusional and scientifically impossible world, the result of atomised imagination, crippled by fear and denial of death.

An ecology of care beyond the human, where there is less suffering and more shared understanding, love, compassion, and ecological wisdom at human scale, is not only scientifically possible, it is also within the reach of our collective imagination, the result of gratitude for a big regenerative cycle of life far beyond human comprehensibility.

Capitalism has all the characteristics of a cult. The discovery and mindless exploitation of fossil fuels has allowed human cultures to become infected by a global mono-cult, which we see reflected in the pathologisation, dehumanisation, and marginalisation of neurodivergent, disabled, and indigenous peoples. Addictive pyramid schemes have replaced the cyclical nature of living systems with a delusional progress narrative.

Beyond focusing our collective human capacity for imagination on collaborative niche construction at human scale, and recognising our human scale cognitive and emotional limits, I would like to see human ambitions dialled down to cosmolocal sharing of lived experiences and to potentially reusable knowledge via a decentralised knowledge commons, along the lines of Open Source Software and Open Research, with no commercial interference in the categorisation and accessibility of knowledge.

Of course that goal is completely beyond my “control”! So I don’t worry about it at scale, and instead focus on doing what I can achieve within in my own small ecology of care, trusting that evolutionary forces far beyond the human are taking care of the living planet at larger scales.

A simple one-liner such as “think globally, live cosmolocally at human scale, within your cognitive and emotional limits, and don’t get distracted by ideological pyramid schemes” is not far off the mark.

Mutual trust

The evolution of the capacity for language and culture deepened the human capacity for shared understanding, mutual trust, and mutual aid.

Social arrangements that involve enduring structures of hierarchical social power are best understood as an abstract cultural parasite that feeds on the human capacity for language and culture. Powered-up interactions (i.e. misunderstandings and conflicts that are not resolved via de-powered dialogue, greater levels of shared understanding, and compassion) result in cognitive dissonance, mistrust, and and eventually manifest in relational trauma, weakening the ecology of care, and externally, the adaptability of the cultural organism relative to other cultural organisms.

The human capacity to extend and appreciate trust at human scale is part of our evolutionary heritage, Nurturing this capacity, and learning how to engage in the big cycle of life as part of an ecology of care beyond the human is the biggest challenge of our times.

The history of civilisations has shown us again and again that mutual trust does not scale to super human scale institutions.

Like “maturity” and “reality” and “progress”, the word “technology” has an agenda for your behavior: usually what is being referred to as “technology” is something that somebody wants you to submit to.  “Technology” often implicitly refers to something you are expected to turn over to “the guys who understand it.” This is actually almost always a political move. Somebody wants you to give certain things to them to design and decide. Perhaps you should, but perhaps not. This applies especially to “media”.

– Ted Nelson, from The Myth of Technology

Intersectional solidarity

We are catalysing intersectional solidarity via quarterly participant driven NeurodiVerse Days of Solidarity, which provide a safe space for neurodivergent, indigenous, and otherwise marginalised people to engage in omni-directional learning and mutual aid.

Open Space

Whoever comes is the right people.
Whatever happens is the only thing that could have.
When it starts is the right time.
When it’s over, it’s over.

Join us in April 2024, and we will keep you informed about the specific events and activities that emerge based on the submissions and ideas we receive.

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4th of March is Weird Pride Day. This is a day for people to embrace their weirdness, and reject the stigma associated with being weird. To publicly express pride in the things that make us weird, and to celebrate the diversity of humankind.

Many people need desperately to receive this message: ‘I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.’
– Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake

To be weird is to be alive. Sailing into the headwind, together. All over the world, people on the margins are converging on the universal language of ecologies of care, weaving new threads into the relational fabric of life:

We all know that the world is in crisis. We are all in crisis, and the path forward is a path through despair – together, participating in omni-directional learning and embracing the unknowable future.

“Normality” is shaped by the many things culturally well adjusted people don’t notice, and by the many things they take for granted. The hump of the bell curve is the false God of Normality.

On Weird Pride Day you are invited to write and talk, make art and videos about what people think is weird about you – and why (and how) you accept these things about yourself.

This could include:

• Stories
• Reflections
• Calls to action
• How to be weird safely

Jointly embracing our weirdness helps us to leave behind the WEIRD mono-cult, by nurturing emergent and beautifully diverse ecologies of care. Weird Pride Day started in 2021, but its roots go back a long way before that.

Too many of us have tried to tone down our weirdness for friends or partners, only to later learn that we were suppressing the best things about us. There’s no joy like the joy of being your strange self and finding that there are people who love you for it.

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

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

Relationships

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

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

Households

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

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

Extended family / whānau

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

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

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

Relationships beyond family / whānau

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

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

Emergence and evolution of culture and values

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Diagnosing diseases in our ecology of care

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

Loneliness

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

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

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

Unhealthy relationships

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

Unhealthy families

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

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

Social diseases at human scale

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

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

Social diseases beyond human scale

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

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

Slow, small, and local is beautiful

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Appreciating the cyclical nature of all life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Healthy and unhealthy freedoms

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

WEIRD freedoms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Human scale freedoms

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

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

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

Onwards!

🔊 Listen

The global mono-cult pretends that all aspects of life can be categorised and understood in terms of normality – by the hump of the bell curve. But the living planet does not conform to anthropocentric normality, it is chaotic, it is beautifully and awesomely diverse.

Normality is a product of the industrial era

The discipline of statistics and the term normality are cultural products of the industrial era, steeped in the Newtonian understanding of the physical laws of motion discovered in the 17th century, which paved the way for formalising the engineering of mechanical machines and the development of industrial factories.

From Wikipedia:

Some authors attribute the credit for the discovery of the normal distribution to de Moivre, who in 1738 published in the second edition of his The Doctrine of Chances the study of the coefficients in the binomial expansion of (a + b)ⁿ.

… Stigler points out that de Moivre himself did not interpret his results as anything more than the approximate rule for the binomial coefficients, and in particular de Moivre lacked the concept of the probability density function. Carl Friedrich Gauss discovered the normal distribution in 1809 as a way to rationalize the method of least squares.

In 1823 Gauss published his monograph “Theoria combinationis observationum erroribus minimis obnoxiae” where among other things he introduces several important statistical concepts, such as the method of least squares, the method of maximum likelihood, and the normal distribution. Gauss used M, M′, M′′, … to denote the measurements of some unknown quantity V, and sought the most probable estimator of that quantity: the one that maximizes the probability φ(M − V) · φ(M′ − V) · φ(M′′ − V) · … of obtaining the observed experimental results. In his notation φΔ is the probability density function of the measurement errors of magnitude Δ. Not knowing what the function φ is, Gauss requires that his method should reduce to the well-known answer: the arithmetic mean of the measured values. Starting from these principles, Gauss demonstrates that the only law that rationalizes the choice of arithmetic mean as an estimator of the location parameter, is the normal law of errors ...

However, by the end of the 19th century some authors had started using the name normal distribution, where the word “normal” was used as an adjective – the term now being seen as a reflection of the fact that this distribution was seen as typical, common – and thus normal. Peirce (one of those authors) once defined “normal” thus: “…the ‘normal’ is not the average (or any other kind of mean) of what actually occurs, but of what would, in the long run, occur under certain circumstances.” Around the turn of the 20th century Pearson popularized the term normal as a designation for this distribution.

Many years ago I called the Laplace–Gaussian curve the normal curve, which name, while it avoids an international question of priority, has the disadvantage of leading people to believe that all other distributions of frequency are in one sense or another ‘abnormal’.
— Pearson (1920)

The living planet does not conform to normality, it is chaotic

I grew up in the 1970s and 80s, and studied mathematics when chaos theory was developed and became practical to be explored with the help of digital computers and numerical algorithms. By that time it was clear that:

There are limits to which sequences of events and the behaviour of complex adaptive systems can be modelled numerically. No increase in computing power will ever allow the behaviour of complex adaptive systems to become predictable, and therefore fully comprehensible to human minds.

From Wikipedia:

Despite initial insights in the first half of the twentieth century, chaos theory became formalized as such only after mid-century, when it first became evident to some scientists that linear theory, the prevailing system theory at that time, simply could not explain the observed behavior of certain experiments like that of the logistic map. What had been attributed to measure imprecision and simple “noise” was considered by chaos theorists as a full component of the studied systems …

The main catalyst for the development of chaos theory was the electronic computer. Much of the mathematics of chaos theory involves the repeated iteration of simple mathematical formulas, which would be impractical to do by hand. Electronic computers made these repeated calculations practical, while figures and images made it possible to visualize these systems. As a graduate student in Chihiro Hayashi’s laboratory at Kyoto University, Yoshisuke Ueda was experimenting with analog computers and noticed, on November 27, 1961, what he called “randomly transitional phenomena”. Yet his advisor did not agree with his conclusions at the time, and did not allow him to report his findings until 1970.

Edward Lorenz was an early pioneer of the theory. His interest in chaos came about accidentally through his work on weather prediction in 1961. Lorenz and his collaborator Ellen Fetter and Margaret Hamilton were using a simple digital computer, a Royal McBee LGP-30, to run weather simulations. They wanted to see a sequence of data again, and to save time they started the simulation in the middle of its course. They did this by entering a printout of the data that corresponded to conditions in the middle of the original simulation. To their surprise, the weather the machine began to predict was completely different from the previous calculation. They tracked this down to the computer printout. The computer worked with 6-digit precision, but the printout rounded variables off to a 3-digit number, so a value like 0.506127 printed as 0.506. This difference is tiny, and the consensus at the time would have been that it should have no practical effect. However, Lorenz discovered that small changes in initial conditions produced large changes in long-term outcome. Lorenz’s discovery, which gave its name to Lorenz attractors, showed that even detailed atmospheric modeling cannot, in general, make precise long-term weather predictions.

In 1963, Benoit Mandelbrot, studying information theory, discovered that noise in many phenomena (including stock prices and telephone circuits) was patterned like a Cantor set, a set of points with infinite roughness and detail Mandelbrot described both the “Noah effect” (in which sudden discontinuous changes can occur) and the “Joseph effect” (in which persistence of a value can occur for a while, yet suddenly change afterwards). In 1967, he published “How long is the coast of Britain? Statistical self-similarity and fractional dimension”, showing that a coastline’s length varies with the scale of the measuring instrument, resembles itself at all scales, and is infinite in length for an infinitesimally small measuring device. Arguing that a ball of twine appears as a point when viewed from far away (0-dimensional), a ball when viewed from fairly near (3-dimensional), or a curved strand (1-dimensional), he argued that the dimensions of an object are relative to the observer and may be fractional. An object whose irregularity is constant over different scales (“self-similarity”) is a fractal (examples include the Menger sponge, the Sierpiński gasket, and the Koch curve or snowflake, which is infinitely long yet encloses a finite space and has a fractal dimension of circa 1.2619). In 1982, Mandelbrot published The Fractal Geometry of Nature, which became a classic of chaos theory ...

As Perry points out, modeling of chaotic time series in ecology is helped by constraint. There is always potential difficulty in distinguishing real chaos from chaos that is only in the model. Hence both constraint in the model and or duplicate time series data for comparison will be helpful in constraining the model to something close to the reality, for example Perry & Wall 1984 …

Economic and financial systems are fundamentally different from those in the classical natural sciences since the former are inherently stochastic in nature, as they result from the interactions of people, and thus pure deterministic models are unlikely to provide accurate representations of the data. The empirical literature that tests for chaos in economics and finance presents very mixed results, in part due to confusion between specific tests for chaos and more general tests for non-linear relationships …

Chaos theory can be applied outside of the natural sciences, but historically nearly all such studies have suffered from lack of reproducibility; poor external validity; and/or inattention to cross-validation, resulting in poor predictive accuracy (if out-of-sample prediction has even been attempted). Glass and Mandell and Selz have found that no EEG study has as yet indicated the presence of strange attractors or other signs of chaotic behavior …

Modern organizations are increasingly seen as open complex adaptive systems with fundamental natural nonlinear structures, subject to internal and external forces that may contribute chaos. For instance, team building and group development is increasingly being researched as an inherently unpredictable system, as the uncertainty of different individuals meeting for the first time makes the trajectory of the team unknowable …

The unavoidability of chaos is a threat to anyone who is vested in systems of control and in maintaining social power gradients.

Imposing normality on an unpredicatable world

Looking back with 20/20 hindsight, the social developments in the WEIRD world since the invention of digital computers can be summarised as a desperate brute force attempt of the physically (via fossil fuels) and socially (via the globalisation of finance and capital flows) powered-up institutions of the industrial paradigm to deny the existence of chaos, and to impose the normality needed to achieve predictable profits for corporations and predictable capital gains for investors.

The pre-internet wave of computing in the 1980s and 1990s that automated industrialised production processes of material goods and related logistics mostly focused on processes and material flows on the factory floor. This era gave birth to the concept of continuous improvement and six sigma techniques in industrialised production. It provided a broad field in which normal distributions proved useful in reducing manufacturing errors and quality deficits in the material goods produced. Many of the factors that define quality of industrially produced goods relate directly to the Newtonian physical laws of motion and stochastic processes with few variables, and can thus be neatly “controlled” by applying the normalising cut-off points of the bell curve.

But even at that time honest and astute practitioners of scientific management like W. Edwards Deming and Harrison Owen clearly saw the limitations of the industrial paradigm, especially in terms of the living humans that are an integral part of the design and operation of any modern corporation, and especially within the context of a competitive, chaos-blind, control-obsessed economic ideology.

“Pay for merit, pay for what you get, reward performance. Sounds great, can’t be done. Unfortunately it can not be done, on short range. After 10 years perhaps, 20 years, yes. The effect is devastating. People must have something to show, something to count. In other words, the merit system nourishes short-term performance. It annihilates long-term planning. It annihilates teamwork. People can not work together. To get promotion you’ve got to get ahead. By working with a team, you help other people. You may help yourself equally, but you don’t get ahead by being equal, you get ahead by being ahead. Produce something more, have more to show, more to count. Teamwork means work together, hear everybody’s ideas, fill in for other people’s weaknesses, acknowledge their strengths. Work together. This is impossible under the merit rating / review of performance system. People are afraid. They are in fear. They work in fear. They can not contribute to the company as they would wish to contribute. This holds at all levels. But there is something worse than all of that. When the annual ratings are given out, people are bitter. They can not understand why they are not rated high. And there is a good reason not to understand. Because I could show you with a bit of time that it is purely a lottery.”
– W Edwards Deming (1984)

The internet era wave of computing from the mid 1990s onwards can be understood as the doubling down on keeping the myth of industrialised normality alive with brute force, by imposing it on the anthropocentric social realm. In The End of the Billionaire Mindset Douglas Rushkoff refers to hyper-normalisation in the digital realm as ‘auto-tuning’.

The internet provided the technological infrastructure, the development of smart phones made internet access quasi ubiquitous, the rise of social media enabled corporations to seize the means of communication and collaboration, and this in turn enabled digital algorithms to ingest, normalise, and disseminate gigatons of user produced content in ways that best serve the interests of digitised capital.

If you are culturally well adjusted to modern society, your sense of “normality” is shaped by the things you don’t notice and by the things that you take for granted. “Normality” is like the air you breathe as a mammal, or the water that you’d be swimming in if you were a fish. The hump of the bell curve is the digital God of Normality.

What started as “big data”, morphed into the “new oil” in a seemingly limitless digital realm – pushing away any niggling concerns about limits to growth in the physical realm, and then morphed again and was sold to power addicted investors as “artificial intelligence”.

“Artificial intelligence” is best understood as the computation of a mono-cultural hyper-normalised view of the world that is explicitly designed to be addictive to individuals and profitable for corporations.

Karl Marx’ critique of capitalism was correct, ownership of the means of production defined the locus of social and economic power in the early industrial era, but he could not foresee the extent to which digitisation of large parts of all forms of human communication would allow some corporations to effectively seize control of the means of communication and collaboration.

The global mono-cult, which continuously perpetuates itself in the anthropocentric digital realm by projecting a hyper-real image of the world in which corporations are “in control”, is increasingly in stark contrast to the ecological state of the world in the physical realm, in which everything is “out of control”.

A world yet to come

We can describe our overall direction of travel as: From artificial scarcity towards ecologies of abundant care. Manish Jain talks about the shift from deadlihoods to alivelihoods. Adebayo Akomolafe talks about a world yet to come.

I don’t think that the vibe here is “Let’s get to a solution and get with it”. I think we’re staying with the trouble of these questions. And somehow, navigating, meandering, Autistically sometimes, this vortex, or these vortices of these questions, will enable new kinds of sensibilities to sprout, and then we will suddenly realise we are different.
– Adebayo Akomolafe

Reflecting deeply on the relational nature of life allows us to become reacquainted with the lower and upper limits of human scale. Along the way we also begin to re-appreciate the limits of human comprehensibility and sense making.

Being at ease in an unpredictable world

The main difference between modern emergent human scale cultural species and prehistoric human scale cultural species lies in the language systems and communication technologies that are being used to coordinate activities and to record and transmit knowledge within cultural organisms, between cultural organisms, and between cultural species.

The proliferation of trauma in industrialised societies is a reflection of the scarcity of genuinely safe de-powered relationships. The path back towards safe social environments is a bottom up approach, focused on small teams, households, and whānau – the exact opposite of the corporate controlled, competitive, and super human scale social media environments that have infiltrated human lives over the last 20 years. Small is beautiful.

Humans all over the world need to address multiple existential threats, without any delay, within a time frame of a few years and decades, which is only possible by framing life in terms of collaborative niche construction, a self-organising process that relies on timeless practices for co-creating good company:

1. The conception of life as a collaborative game that involves trust, mutual aid and learning
2. Shared biographical information, which helps us understand prior experiences and trauma
3. Joint experiences, which allows us to appreciate the extent to which various situations are experienced in similar or different ways, and which gives us insights into the cognitive lens of the other person
4. Regular sharing of new experiences and observations, which allows us to learn more about the cognitive lens and the values of the other person
5. Asking for advice, which allows us to acknowledge our own limitations, extend trust, and appreciate the knowledge and unique capability of the other person
6. Being asked for advice, which signals trust and which gives us feedback on how the other person perceives our level of knowledge and domain specific competency
7. The development of relationships and trust takes time

Over time this self-organising process results in unique relationships of deep trust between people, and in unique cultural microcosms between pairs of people that provides us with a baseline of safety. In human scale groups, over time, these practices result in new adaptive paradigmatic frameworks that are tailored around the unique needs of the members of a specific ecology of care.

Within good company (smaller than 50 people), everyone is acutely aware of the competencies of all the others, and transparency and mutual trust enables wisdom and meta knowledge (who has which knowledge and who entrusts whom with questions or needs in relation to specific domains of knowledge) to flow freely. This allows the group to rapidly respond intelligently, creatively, and with courage to all kinds of external events.

Humans are not the first hyper-social species on this planet. Insects such as ants offer great examples of successful collaborative niche collaboration at immense scale over millions of years.

Evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson observes that small groups rather than individuals are the primary organisms of human societies. This should provide all of us with food for thought and it has massive implications for the cosmolocal future of our species.

It turns out that 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.

Somehow the Wonder of Life Prevails – Mark Kozelek & Jimmy LaValle

🔊 Listen

Autists learn and play differently, because our senses work differently, and because we make sense of the world in different ways. Our sensory profiles don’t allow us to push cognitive dissonance out of conscious awareness. We feel and know that a way of life that traumatises large segments of the population and the non-human world does not make any sense. We need to slow down, to the relational speed of life.

Less WEIRD education

The best way to understand human capabilities and ways of being is to observe and learn from young children from non-WEIRD cultures.

Learning : the ability to sense and comprehend commonalities and variabilities via the embodied experience that is available to us via our senses.

By being grounded in the innate human ability to make sense of sensory inputs this basic definition of learning is not limited to humans and avoids obvious cultural bias. The following presentation by Prof Jinan KB makes a whole number of further observations, and is relevant to anyone involved in education:

Jinan KB de-emphasises the role of written linear language and instead emphasises learning and sense making by direct observation and sensory experience. This bottom up approach to culture co-creation stands in contrast to the top-down approach to cultural indoctrination that characterises the institutions and paradigmatic inertia of powered-up empires. The top-down approach has been meticulously analysed and described by Niklas Luhman.

Autistic ways of learning

The de-emphasis of language, the focus on sense making by direct observation and sensory experience, and rich mental models of commonalities and variabilities that are not easily expressible in words fits well with the ways in which Autistic people engage with the world.

Also, the notion that the parents primarily have an opportunity to learn from children, and not the other way around, is consistent with the Autistic ways of learning outlined in the communal definition of Autistic ways of being.

Unusual sensitivity profiles allow Autists to identify commonalities and variabilities that escape others. In terms of social interactions we gravitate towards those with compatible sensitivity profiles. Autistic ways of being are no mystery. We are humans with unique qualities and limitations. Like all humans, we are not replaceable cogs, and we are not programmable blank slates either. 

Autists learn and play differently, because our senses work differently, and because we make sense of the world in different ways.

So-called neuronormative children are easily indoctrinated using a top down authoritarian approach. As part of the indoctrination, they learn to suppress their pre/non-linguistic sense making by direct observation, and they learn to suppress the urge to think critically and question abstract cultural constructs that are disconnected from first hand sensory experience. 

Neuronormative children learn to cope with growing levels of cognitive dissonance to the point where cognitive dissonance is experienced as “normality”, i.e. as nothing to worry about.

Autists never become habituated to growing levels of cognitive dissonance. Dis-ease remains part of Autistic conscious experience.

Autistic sensory profiles don’t allow us to push cognitive dissonance out of conscious awareness. Our cognitive load increases. To regain spoons, we need to retreat to a safe space in which we are not exposed to social expectations that trigger cognitive dissonance. Given that Autistic baseline sensitivities diverge from “normality”, the above applies throughout Autistic lives, starting when we are babies. These differences from “normality” lead us down a path of monotropism, which helps us to avoid being continuously overwhelmed. 

Monotropism can be understood as a downstream effect of the ways of learning and playfulness that emerge from unusual sensitivity profiles. 

Hypernormative WEIRD cultures generate much higher levels of stress and cognitive dissonance than small scale indigenous cultures, and this affects Autistic children with unusual sensory profiles more than others.

When an entire society applies an anthropocentric bell curve to define cut-off points for “normality”, and pathologises all those beyond the cut-off points, it choses to no longer learn from Autistic and otherwise neurodivergent people. This not only allows cognitive dissonance to grow within society, it also weakens the human cultural immune system, and our collective human ability to adapt to changing environmental conditions.

WEIRD lack of authenticity

Hans-Georg Moeller’s book on profilicity elaborates in depth how the demands of modernity are in a fundamental conflict with the notion of authenticity, i.e. how cognitive dissonance becomes normalised.

I concur with Hans-Gerog Moeller’s analysis, but I argue that authenticity – and a significant reduction in cognitive dissonance, are available to us if we consciously limit our social sphere to a comprehensible human scale, and focus on nurturing de-powered relationships. 

The cognitive dissonance we experience grows with the number of powered-up relationships we have to endure, and with the extent to which we are exposed to a super-human scale social sphere, i.e. to large anonymous institutions and groups.

Jinan KB’s insights make it obviously that each child is on a unique developmental trajectory that is determined by the environment and a unique sensory profile. This is in stark contrast to the assumed “standard milestones” that WEIRD parents and teachers have come to expect as “normal”. This developmental perspective adds an additional dimension to coherent theories of human ways of being.

Have you ever wondered why storytelling is such a trendy topic? If this question bothers you and makes you uncomfortable, your perspective on human affairs and your cognitive lens is rather unusual. Humans are biased to thinking they understand more than they actually do, and this effect is further amplified by technologies such as the Internet, which connects us to an exponentially growing pool of information.

Storytelling in the age of mass media and social media is linked to the rise of marketing and persuasive writing. Stories are appealing and hold persuasive potential because of their role in cultural transmission is the result of gene-culture co-evolution in tandem with the human capability for symbolic thought and spoken language. In human culture stories are involved in two functions:

1. Transmission of beliefs that are useful for the members of a group. Shared beliefs are the catalyst for improved collaboration.
2. Deception in order to protect or gain social status within a group or between groups. In the framework of contemporary competitive economic ideology deception is often referred to as marketing.

Storytelling thus is a key element of cultural evolution. Unfortunately cultural evolution fuelled by storytelling is a terribly slow and shallow form of learning for societies, even though storytelling is an impressively fast way for transmitting beliefs to other individuals.

The extent to which deceptive storytelling is tolerated is influenced by cultural norms, by the effectiveness of institutions and technologies entrusted with the enforcement of cultural norms, and the level of social inequality within a society. Unsurprisingly, the prevalence of psychopathic traits in the upper echelons of the corporate world seems to be between 3% and 21%, much higher than the 1% prevalence in the general population.

The modern WEIRD way of life does not make sense. No anthropocentric civilisation makes any sense. All social power gradients between individuals generate harmful cognitive dissonance, and at larger scales they perpetuate anthropocentric hypernormativity, dehumanisation, warfare, and systemic oppression.

… Interrupting, tweaking, lying, exaggerating, silencing, omitting—these little acts become huge fissures in our relationships. This practice dehumanizes, devitalizes, and shreds our deep connections to each other. The delicacy of life on this planet is hanging in the balance.

It happens at home, in our communities, and in the world around us. The infection of this breaking of our together-unity is tearing the fibers of life apart in the way cancer cells tear apart the body’s ability to communicate. It makes the world a place where the only reasonable thing to do is “watch out for number one.”

While it may be a prevailing logic of debating or convincing of others of our position, the art of communication distortion is a dangerous game. It leads to a moment much like the present, when it is impossible to know who is sincere, and what information they base their sincerity upon. Who should you believe? What is left of our communing that is not for sale? A sentence is likely to be worded to evoke particular impressions.

From ‘Communication is sacred’ by Nora Bateson (2024)

The actual effect of the myth of meritocracy, which is used to normalise and rationalise head to head competition, is a consistent bias to over-represent capabilities, and to actively avoid thinking about externalities. 

Conceptualising social power as an addiction provides the majority of the human population with a highly effective bullshit detection tool, capable of eroding the social licence of the toxic institutions and social paradigms that are holding entire societies hostage to decisions made by power drunk addicts.

An alien observer of human societies would probably be amazed that some humans are given a platform for virtually unlimited storytelling at a scale that affects billions and hundreds of millions people, and that delusional and misleading stories are let lose on the population of a species that is the local champion of cultural transmission on this planet. It is time to acknowledge the many ways in which modern WEIRD ways of life traumatise large segments of the population and the non-human world.

Autistic people easily get depressed and develop physical health conditions when having to survive in social environments that deny Autistic authenticity and that continuously expect Autistic people to conform to neuronormative cultural rituals. Sooner or later, unless the Autist is able to shift or change the environmental context, recurring traumatic experiences result in chronic depression and Autistic burnout.

Depowered dialogue

The smallest unit of learning is a feedback loop. Power is the privilege of not needing to learn. The dynamic process of life is best understood in relational terms.

At human scale, all healthy relationships, independently of the level of intimacy, are characterised by the maintenance of de-powered dialogue – by a mutual deep desire to understand a precious living being.

Humans can only comprehend the impact of social agreements up to the limits of human scale. Social agreements that have been arrived at in Open Space and in a process of de-powered dialogue catalyse greater levels of shared understanding and hold great potential for reducing harm.

The language of evolutionary design encapsulates and formalises timeless principles that can be traced back to the earliest rock paintings and diagrammatic representations, which enabled important knowledge to be transmitted reliably in otherwise largely oral human scale cultures over tens of thousands of years.

The human capacity for language and cultural transmission via language does not have to degenerate into a life destroying mono-cult.

By limiting ourselves to human scale, we retain the ability to make sense of life in terms of ecologies of care beyond the human, to nurture shared understanding in depowered dialogue, and to co-ordinate human affairs in Open Space.

De-powered environments in which social power dynamics are not allowed to emerge and escalate reduce uncertainties and related fears, confusion, and doubts.

Slowing down

Many people are stuck in survival mode. We need to slow down, to the relational speed of life.

By definition no one is able to do this in isolation. It also can not be achieved by training. It requires lived experience, imagining alternative de-powered social operating models, and educating ourselves in critical thinking tools and de-powered forms of transdisciplinary collaboration. 

It is interesting to look at the above conversation as a trans-generational dialogue, and recognising the immense value of such dialogues – when the conversation is fully de-powered. Learning is best framed in terms of the new questions, new conceptual blends, and the shared understanding and caring relationships that can only arise in the context of de-powered dialogue.

To avoid tired, simplistic, and polarising political frames, we can describe our overall direction of travel as: From artificial scarcity towards ecologies of abundant care.

Some of us have many years of experience with the art of de-powering. Collectively we need to catalyse these efforts substantially via intersectional solidarity on the margins of society and education as part of the neurodiversity movement. Even over the long-term, the timeless art of de-powering will remain relevant, to clamp down on social power gradients wherever they start to (re)emerge.

Employment

Traditional employment in hierarchically structured organisations is not a viable, healthy, or survivable option for Autistic people, no matter of how the hierarchy of control is framed.

As Harrison Owen and all experienced Open Space facilitators point out again and again, the notion of “being in control”, especially being in control of other people is an anthropocentric delusion.

Life is a self-organising process, and humans thrive in life affirming cultures that acknowledge and actively encourage self-organisation.

The Western notion of the independent individual self is a delusion rooted in the anthropocentric and life denying cultural assumptions of the industrial revolution. Many Autists who opt out of traditional employment to become individually self-employed contractors sooner or later discover that they have simply exchanged one set of problems with another set of problems, within the same life denying wider cultural context.

It strikes me how the entire Autism Industrial Complex seems to be bent on railroading Autistic youngsters and their parents on a track of preparing for employment or various precarious forms of self-employment in roles that suit the established institutional landscape of large anonymous corporations and financial investors. I have yet to see a single piece of mainstream autism research that explicitly explores other, much more life affirming and economic paradigm busting options for Autistic people.

The lived experience of many Autists literally lies outside the mainstream economic paradigm. We live our entire lives beyond the cutoff points of the arbitrary anthropocentric bell curve of “normality” of industrialised civilisation. The social model of disability applies, and it points to the “externalities” of WEIRD cultural bias.

Entrepreneurship & worker co-ops

Many of the challenges Autistic people are facing today are not new. They were obvious to many – if not most – workers in the early days of the industrialisation.

The following Wikipedia definitions provide relevant historic context and point towards alternative social arrangements that work well for many Autistic and otherwise neurodivergent people. I have crossed out a few words and highlighted key ideas to reflect some of the thoughts that flowed into the co-creation of the Neurodiventure worker-coop model that the team that I am part of has been using since 2012:

Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value in ways that generally entail beyond the minimal amount of risk (assumed by a traditional business), and potentially involving values besides simply economic ones.

An entrepreneur is an individual who creates and/or invests in one or more businesses, bearing most of the risks and enjoying most of the rewards.[1] The process of setting up a business is known as “entrepreneurship”. The entrepreneur is commonly seen as an innovator, a source of new ideas, goods, services, and business/or procedures.

A worker cooperative is a cooperative owned and self-managed by its workers. This control may mean a firm where every worker-owner participates in decision-making in a democratic fashion, or it may refer to one in which management is elected by every worker-owner who each have one vote.

The Wikipedia article on worker co-ops continues:

Worker cooperatives rose to prominence during the Industrial Revolution as part of the labour movement. As employment moved to industrial areas and job sectors declined, workers began organizing and controlling businesses for themselves. Worker cooperatives were originally sparked by “critical reaction to industrial capitalism and the excesses of the industrial revolution,” with the first worker owned and managed firm first appearing in England in 1760.[1] Some worker cooperatives were designed to “cope with the evils of unbridled capitalism and the insecurities of wage labor”.[1]

…

also referencing CICOPA, the International Organisation of Industrial, Artisanal and Service Producers’ Cooperatives, approved by the International Co-operative Alliance General Assembly in September 2005, and the following section on the basic characteristics of workers’ cooperatives:

(1) They have the objective of creating and maintaining sustainable jobs and generating wealth, to improve the quality of life of the worker-members, dignify human work, allow workers’ democratic self-management and promote community and local development.

(2) The free and voluntary membership of their members, in order to contribute with their personal work and economic resources, is conditioned by the existence of workplaces.

(3) As a general rule, work shall be carried out by the members. This implies that the majority of the workers in a given worker cooperative enterprise are members and vice versa.

(4) The worker-members’ relation with their cooperative shall be considered as different from that of conventional wage-based labor and to that of autonomous individual work.

(5) Their internal regulation is formally defined by regimes that are democratically agreed upon and accepted by the worker-members.

(6) They shall be autonomous and independent, before the State and third parties, in their labor relations and management, and in the usage and management of the means of production.[38]

Even though there is no universally accepted definition of a workers’ cooperative, they can be considered to be businesses that make a product or offer a service to sell for profit where the workers are members or worker-owners.

Worker-owners work in the business company, govern it and manage it. Unlike with conventional firms, ownership and decision-making power of a worker cooperative should be vested solely with the worker-owners and ultimate authority rests with the worker-owners as a whole. Worker-owners control the resources of the cooperative and the work process, such as wages or hours of work.

As mentioned above, the majority—if not all—of the workers in a given worker cooperative enterprise are worker-owners, although some casual or wage workers may be employed with whom profits and decision making are not necessarily shared equally. Workers also often undergo a trial or screening period (such as three or six months) before being allowed to have full voting rights.[1]

Participation is based on one vote per worker-owner, regardless of the number of shares or equity owned by each worker-owner. Voting rights are not tied to investment or patronage in the workers’ co-operative, and only worker-owners can vote on decisions that affect them. In practice, worker co-operatives have to accommodate a range of interests to survive and have experimented with different voice and voting arrangements to accommodate the interests of trade unions,[39] local authorities,[40] those who have invested proportionately more labor, or through attempts to mix individual and collective forms of worker-ownership and control.[41]

As noted by theorists and practitioners alike, the importance of capital should be subordinated to labor in workers’ cooperatives. Indeed, Adams et al. see workers’ cooperatives as “labor-ist” rather than “capital-ist”:

“Labor is the hiring factor, therefore the voting and property rights are assigned to the people who do the work and not to capital, even though the worker-members supply capital through membership fees and retained earnings…Any profit or loss after normal operating expenses is assigned to members on the basis of their labor contribution.”[1]

…

In short, workers’ co-operatives are organized to serve the needs of worker-owners by generating benefits (which may or may not be profits) for the worker-owners rather than external investors. This worker-driven orientation makes them fundamentally different from other corporations. Additional cooperative structural characteristics and guiding principles further distinguish them from other business models. For example, worker-owners may not believe that profit maximization is the best or only goal for their co-operative or they may follow the Rochdale Principles. As another example, worker cooperatives’ flattened management structure and more egalitarian ideology often give workers more options and greater freedom in resolving work-place problems.[43]

Profits (or losses) earned by the worker’s cooperative are shared by worker-owners. Salaries generally have a low ratio difference which ideally should be “guided by principles of proportionality, external solidarity and internal solidarity”.[1]

In my experience worker co-ops of Autists and otherwise neurodivergent people provide by far the healthiest and most life affirming life path for Autistic people in our times. I am far from alone in this assessment, and yet the Autism Industrial Complex is completely silent about this fact, which reflects the lived experience and the rates of burn-out in employment / self-employment of Autistic people.

The history of worker co-ops illustrates that dehumanising work conditions in the industrial and post-industrial era are not new, and they affect all workers. The differences between the early industrial revolution and today are not explainable in genuine improvements in working conditions. Instead they can be understood as a combination of two factors:

1. Improvements in sanitation that were (re)discovered the hard way, in the wake of the extreme levels of urban concentration and deprivation, and corresponding infectious disease burdens in the centres of industry.
2. The discovery and widespread use of fossil fuels to automate most manual physical labour, which has led to a shift towards less physically taxing work, but also to a much lesser dependence on large numbers of workers in industrialised manufacturing and industrialised agriculture.

As a result, many dangerous physical labour intensive jobs have been replaced by machines, and have been replaced with jobs that drive up demand for good and services, i.e. consumption. The increase in busyness, i.e. inventing and selling more and more goods and services that no one used to “need”, together with the convenience afforded by harnessing the work performed by fossil fuels, is the backbone of the WEIRD progress myth, which equates to exponentially growing ecological harm of the material footprint of modern humans.

Mutual aid

The notion of ecologies of care is growing in more and more places in the cultural compost heap of the industrialised mono-cult.

The risk of global catastrophe and ever-growing inequality characterize the conditions of living on a wounded planet. Acknowledging that care is always implicated in the given, defined by the aftermath of patriarchal oppression and colonial violence as well as by present-day compulsory neoliberalism and capital accumulation, ecologies of care work on conflicts related to care and towards the freedom and joy to care. Bringing together practices of maintenance and repair, multispecies ethics, social reproduction theory, public pedagogies, critical heritage studies, feminist infrastructural critique, and hydrofeminist engagements as well as the rights of humans and of nature, ecologies of care aspire to new public imaginaries of care.

Ecologies of Care is a group of curators, artists, architects, and researchers convened by Urška Jurman and Elke Krasny in 2021

The notion of life as a competitive game 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.

The current human predicament is a result of the cultural disease of super-human scale powered-up civilisation building endeavours, the origins of which can be traced back to the beginnings of “modern” human history and the social power dynamics resulting from the invention of interest bearing debt around 5,000 years ago.

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, is essential for neurodivergent people to navigate sensory and emotional overload, and for (re)creating safe environments for ourselves and our human and non-human contemporaries.

Onwards!

Collectively, in mutual support, we are are centring Autistic lived experiences via participatory Autistic research, by actively supporting Autistic research projects, by coordinating Autistic peer support, and by curating useful tools developed by neurodivergent people for neurodivergent people. For systematic education, we are curating timeless concepts for nurturing and describing ecologies of care.

🔊 Listen

In the cult of busyness the simplistic logic of finance acts as a universal linguistic and psychological security blanket.

The world of finance feels comfortable because it conjures up the illusion that all eventualities can be calculated and quantified, satisfying the human need for certainty. The more obscure the financial tools, the more layers are added to the cake of financial instruments, the more complex the algorithms, the greater the feeling of being in control for those who benefit from the simplistic logic of finance, and the greater the level of detachment from the biophysical and ecological world that we are part of.

The delusion of continuous technological progress, which is baked into the foundations of the religion of the invisible hand in the form of universal fungibility adds another layer to the linguistic and psychological security blanket.

The cult-ivation of cognitive dissonance

The self-preservation instinct of powered-up institutions is a virtual guarantee for persistent cognitive dissonance between published statements of intent, priorities and commitments, and executive summaries of results and the actions undertaken and the results achieved.

Like “maturity” and “reality” and “progress”, the word “technology” has an agenda for your behavior: usually what is being referred to as “technology” is something that somebody wants you to submit to.  “Technology” often implicitly refers to something you are expected to turn over to “the guys who understand it.” This is actually almost always a political move.  Somebody wants you to give certain things to them to design and decide. Perhaps you should, but perhaps not.

– TedNelson’s Computer Paradigm, Expressed as One-Liners, 1999

Andreas Malm provides us with an excellent overview of “Climate Politics When It’s Too Late” from a European perspective. Our institutions have become the drug of choice for people addicted to social power.

While lying is an attempt to conceal the truth, bullshit is to talk without reference to the truth. ‘It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth – this indifference to how things really are – that I regard as the essence of bullshit’. Underpinning this is a ‘motive guiding and controlling’ the bullshitter meaning they are ‘unconcerned with how the things about which he speaks truly are’. Recent psychological research considers the targets of bullshit by examining how some people with an ‘uncritical open mind’ are particularly receptive to bullshit. More sociologically oriented research has pointed out that in some social settings ‘bullshit’ is expected, enthusiastically embraced or silently tolerated.

Bullshit is a form of linguistic interaction. It involves characteristic patterns of communication such as evasiveness or not being held to account for one’s claims. Bringing these three aspects together, I define bullshit as empty and misleading communication. A more substantive definition of bullshit is that it consists of evasive and/or persuasive communication involving an indifference to the truth or attempts to pursue the truth which are driven by epistemically maligned intentions.

The bullshitter falls short of lying because they make use of insincere and misleading statements rather than outright falsehoods. Recent psychological work has found that established measures of everyday lying are sufficiently distinct from bullshitting.

The most intuitive explanation for why bullshit exists is the individual bullshitter. Many philosophical accounts assume that particular individuals have questionable motives or moral flaws which predispose them to bullshitting. For instance, Frankfurt points towards questionable motives of bullshitters such as intention to mislead their audience for personal gain. Others point out that bullshitters are driven by Machiavellian motives like deceiving their audience to gain power and resources. More recently, Cassam has argued that bullshitters are plagued by ‘epistemological vices’ such as carelessness, negligence, dogmatism and prejudice. Perhaps the most important of these is ‘epistemic insouciance’. This entails ‘a casual lack of concern about the facts or an indifference to whether their political statements have any basis in reality’. Some have argued that bullshitters suffer from cognitive failures. Finally, a recent study of school children found that bullshitters shared demographic characteristics; they were more likely to be males from better-off socioeconomic background.

Mats Alvesson argued that wider socio-cultural concerns with ‘imagology’ (looks and appearance) has encouraged organizations and individuals to generate clichés and bullshit. In my own book on the topic, I explored how the changing nature of bureaucracy created ideal conditions for bullshit. The rise of ‘neocracies’ which are obsessed with constant change and novelty has led organizations as well as people working within them to produce a large stream of bullshit.

– André Spicer, Playing the Bullshit Game: How Empty and Misleading Communication Takes Over Organizations, 2020

How did we get here?

The old Daoist thinkers can teach us a lot about how we’ve ended up in this situation.

71. 1. To know and yet (think) we do not know is the highest (attainment); not to know (and yet think) we do know is a disease. 

2. It is simply by being pained at (the thought of) having this disease that we are preserved from it. The sage has not the disease. He knows the pain that would be inseparable from it, and therefore he does not have it.

72. 1. When the people do not fear what they ought to fear, that which is their great dread will come on them. 

2. Let them not thoughtlessly indulge themselves in their ordinary life; let them not act as if weary of what that life depends on. 

3. It is by avoiding such indulgence that such weariness does not arise. 

4. Therefore the sage knows (these things) of himself, but does not parade (his knowledge); loves, but does not (appear to set a) value on, himself. And thus he puts the latter alternative away and makes choice of the former.

Nate Hagens does a good job of explaining the implications for our immediate future to people in WEIRD societies. To understand the specific role of our modern global digital media and communication environments in the social construction of modern culture, the theory of media and society developed by Niklas Luhmann has a lot to offer. Hans-Georg Moeller provides an excellent introduction:

Luhmann argues that the system of mass media is a set of recursive, self-referential programs of communication, whose functions are not determined by the external values of truthfulness, objectivity, or knowledge, nor by specific social interests or political directives. Rather, he contends that the system of mass media is regulated by the internal code information/noninformation, which enables the system to select its information (news) from its own environment and to communicate this information in accordance with its own reflexive criteria.

Despite its self-referential quality, Luhmann describes the mass media as one of the key cognitive systems of modern society, by means of which society constructs the illusion of its own reality.

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 owned by technofeudal lords.

Luhmann’s theory is a framework that allows us to articulate how global corporations in the digital era have not only seized the means of production, but also the means of communication, as well as large parts of the means of education, turning much of education into a form of corporate obedience training.

The open question is how humans will treat each other and our non-human contemporaries on the journey towards being composted and recycled. 

We live in WEIRD times – Autistic people don’t belong here

Autistic people are amongst the canaries in the life denying coal mine of WEIRD societies.

The acronym WEIRD—Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic—aims to raise people’s consciousness about psychological differences and to emphasize that WEIRD people are but one unusual slice of humanity’s cultural diversity. WEIRD highlights the sampling bias present in studies conducted in cognitive science, behavioral economics, and psychology.
…
WEIRD people are highly individualistic, which means we are overconfident, self-obsessed and even more suicide-prone. WEIRD people also tend to be highly analytical in their thinking. That is, we focus on individuals and their properties at the expense of relationships and backgrounds. But, of course, sometimes mending a friendship or spotting a problem requires attending to the contexts and to the social ties involved. Similarly, WEIRD people are, relative to many other populations, less willing to help their family and friends at a cost to themselves or strangers. WEIRD people also have some irrational decision-making biases—such as what’s called “the endowment effect,” which explains why sellers are so often disappointed in how much their home is worth—we overvalue our own stuff.

The original academic definition W.E.I.R.D. referenced above stays clear of a deeper critique of the religion of the invisible hand and the delusion of technological progress. I use the term as a shorthand reference to the group of societies that think of themselves as Western Educated Industrialised Rich Democratic, and to the associated cultural bias that is baked into Western cognitive science, behavioral economics, and psychology.

In my writing I highlight how the collective behaviour of WEIRD societies is best understood as WEIRDT : Western Educated Industrialised Rich Democratic Theatre. Everything in this theatre is about perception – there is no substance or connection to the biophysical and ecological context outside the theatre. Niklas Luhmann’s theory of society is consistent with this notion of WEIRDT, and already the Daoists perfectly understood the critical importance of theatrical perception management in all powered-up empire building endeavours.

The effects of living in a hypernormative performance-oriented culture are profound, affecting everyone to varying degrees in terms of:

1. Lack of trustworthy human scale social agreements
2. Lack of confidence in first hand experience
3. Lack of education in critical thinking and reasoning
4. Lack of experience with creative forms of collaboration in genuinely safe environments

None of this is new.

Whilst many organisations give lip service to the benefits of diversity, a number of marginalised and vulnerable groups still experience discrimination. The disabled and particularly those considered ‘mentally disabled’ are amongst the most disadvantaged groups despite attempts to use policies to change social attitudes and behaviours.

– Diane Babak, Management of People Weird and Feared, 2013

In contrast to culturally “well-adjusted” people, Autistic people are consciously aware of these ubiquitously present factors. We have openly talked about them since the earliest days of the internet, we don’t tolerate the cognitive dissonance, we feel dehumanised, we refuse to be assimilated, we withdraw from bad company, we collaborate in atypical – Autistic – ways to co-create good company.

The mental health crisis, which is best understood as a crisis of pervasive cognitive dissonance, and which affects large parts of the population, creates plenty of profitable opportunities for ambulance at the bottom of the cliff approaches. The second order social effects of performance-oriented societies that cult-ivate and reward bullshit manifest in terms of a serious learning disability:

• Inability to discern valuable scientific insights from pseudoscience and scientism
• Vulnerability to being influenced by arbitrary opinions, a trend that is being amplified by mega scale social media platforms as well as by the propaganda machines of corporations and governments
• Indiscriminate lack of confidence in the reliability of any beliefs, resignation to relativism – anything could be true and anything could be false, the feeling of being lost in a world of illusions
• Loss of imagination, as all confidence in collective action and possibility of community co-creation is lost
• Increasing levels of detachment from most of the human and non-human living world, the entire world seems unsafe and unreliable
• Inability to understand the world
• Paralysis, loss of agency

The inmates are locked into a system of busyness as usual that feels deeply familiar, where deviation from absurd performance expectations is associated with a fear of the unknown, where the dread of being seen as a deviant routinely gets in the way of exploring the unknown territory that lies beyond the culturally impaired capacity for imagination and creative collaboration at human scale.

In concrete terms, the suicidal collective learning disability of our powered-up society manifests as a ten to twenty year lag between the time when specific social and ecological problems become obvious to those on the margins of society who are educated in critical thinking tools and who are close to the problems at hand, and the acknowledgement of these problems in the public media. By the time social and ecological problems become part of public discourse, often unimaginable harm has already been done, and further, even more severe problems have emerged, which are not yet deemed acceptable for public discourse.

This state of affairs suits the cult of busyness just fine. Devoted disciples who have mastered the art of bullshit like to reframe the obsession with busyness as a continuous drive for efficiency. In such an environment it is easy to pathologise Autistic people who refuse to pretend that everything is fine, who refuse to go along with the flow, who dare to question conventional “wisdom” and perpetual techno-optimism.

The norms of our society can be understood as a projection of social ills onto neurodivergent people, including the emergence of an Autism Industrial Complex, and a proliferation of pathologising autism research. A society that systematically desensitises all its people to social inequality and that instead celebrates individual success based on material wealth and social vanity metrics creates a sick social environment that disables society as a whole. 

Autistic people don’t play social games, instead we actively resist them. We are primarily guided by our principles, our egalitarian sense of fairness, and are less prone to being corrupted by monetary rewards. And for this we are pathologised and vilified. It is not an accident that Greta Thunberg is Autistic. A growing literature suggests that Autists display reduced susceptibility to cognitive biases and exhibit more rational and bias-free processing of information.

The enhanced rationality of Autistic people has valuable implications for the understanding of human rationality and for understanding the role of neurodiversity in cultural evolution. Within the bigger picture of cultural evolution Autistic traits have obvious mid and long-term benefits to society, but these benefits are associated with short-term costs for social status seeking individuals within the local social environments of Autistic people. In the digital sphere enshitification of platforms is one of the glaringly obvious symptoms of catabolic capitalism.

Reactivating the reservoir of human imagination

Neurological and cultural diversity is the reservoir of imagination of the human species. In a time of existential crises the collective creative potential of neurodivergent people and marginalised cultures has become more important than ever.

Marginalised people have a conception of life essentials that differs from the WEIRDT mainstream. Letting go of spurious, i.e. non-essential complexity will only be devastating for the few who need to be weaned off their addiction to social power. It is well known that all major social change originates on the margins of society.

We have to realise that in our hypernormalised global consumer culture transformational change can only emanate from indigenous cultures, from systemically marginalised and sometimes criminalised groups, and from pathologised neurodivergent people. The implications for co-creating good company are profound.

The only way to reactivate the reservoir of human imagination is by fully re-humanising all neurodivergent and otherwise marginalised people. The WEIRDT world has a lot to learn from those who are non-compliant, from those who refuse to be trained in the art of bullshit, and from those who prefer to educate themselves in creative collaboration and critical thinking tools.

🔊 Listen

Life is an ecological process. This is the case for all living organisms. In a healthy habitat, organisms experience life as being part of an ecology of care. This is the case irrespective of the scale of the organism.

Ecologies of care

An ecology of care is a local mutual aid network that transcends many species boundaries and that extends over multiple levels of scale.

Humans evolved to live in networks of small and highly collaborative groups, where interactions within the group are experienced as relational, between parties that live with each other on a daily basis. The most adaptive and flexible cultures are those that don’t tolerate significant social power gradients between individuals, and especially those that also maintain highly collaborative relationships with other groups.

Within ecological processes, adaptive evolution is primarily an energy conserving long-term phenomenon that occurs over the course of many generations, rather than an energy intensive form of head to head competition. Human cultural practices of course can evolve and adapt much faster, but in healthy societies cultural evolution is a collaborative rather than a competitive process.

In a healthy society, care and mutual aid extends to all members of the group, and across multiple generations, up to 150 to 200 years into the future – far beyond individual lifespans and the lifespan of the next generation. Cultural intolerance for significant social power gradients and concerns for communal wellbeing across seven generations creates a safe space for creative collaboration, and it leaves no room for individual competitive social power games to escalate into permanent command and control hierarchies. It is easy to imagine that the evolution of the capacity for abstract symbolic human language has been fuelled by the evolutionary benefits that emerge from conscious social agreements to clamp down on individual competitive social power games.

All of this changed only recently between 10,000 and 5,000 years ago, with the development of agriculture, the emergence of large cities – especially settlements that are occupied all year round, linear written language, and the invention of interest bearing debt. These developments created large scale anonymous social environments, and opened the door for competitive social power games to become established and “normalised”.

Performing instead of living

Fast forward a few thousand years to the industrial era, and 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. A few even start to see related problems in parenting, but lack the imagination to address the underlying problems in education and in wider society, which are amplified by digital media technologies.

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.

Powering-up human relationships makes us stupid

In a performance-oriented culture “getting ahead” is what matters most. Finding ways of meeting the numbers is what matters, being perceived in the “right” way is what counts.

Our society has increasingly cult-ivated performance, technological progress, and the “art” of perception management.

Pay for merit, pay for what you get, reward performance. Sounds great, can’t be done. Unfortunately it can not be done, on short range. After 10 years perhaps, 20 years, yes. The effect is devastating. People must have something to show, something to count. In other words, the merit system nourishes short-term performance. It annihilates long-term planning. It annihilates teamwork. People can not work together. To get promotion you’ve got to get ahead. By working with a team, you help other people. You may help yourself equally, but you don’t get ahead by being equal, you get ahead by being ahead. Produce something more, have more to show, more to count. Teamwork means work together, hear everybody’s ideas, fill in for other people’s weaknesses, acknowledge their strengths. Work together. This is impossible under the merit rating / review of performance system. People are afraid. They are in fear. They work in fear. They can not contribute to the company as they would wish to contribute. This holds at all levels. But there is something worse than all of that. When the annual ratings are given out, people are bitter. They can not understand why they are not rated high. And there is a good reason not to understand. Because I could show you with a bit of time that it is purely a lottery. 

– W Edwards Deming, 1984

No one’s life has yet been simplified by a computer. 

– Ted Nelson, Computer Lib, 1974

In 1974, computers were oppressive devices in far-off airconditioned places. Now you can be oppressed by computers in your own living room.

– Ted Nelson, Computer Lib, 1987 edition

The Myth of “Technology”. A frying-pan is technology.  All human artifacts are technology.  But beware anybody who uses this term.  Like “maturity” and “reality” and “progress”, the word “technology” has an agenda for your behavior: usually what is being referred to as “technology” is something that somebody wants you to submit to.  “Technology” often implicitly refers to something you are expected to turn over to “the guys who understand it.”

This is actually almost always a political move.  Somebody wants you to give certain things to them to design and decide. Perhaps you should, but perhaps not.

– TedNelson’s Computer Paradigm, Expressed as One-Liners, 1999

We do not deal properly with the issue of climate change. We do not deal properly with the issues of peace, war, immigration, food resources, water resources, public health, and all these important issues. We became incompetent because society as a whole began to focus on how to deceive and trick people. 

– Jaron Lanier, 2019

Successful bullshitting enhances the image of bullshitters. This happens when bullshitters are able to more or less convincingly present themselves as more grandiose than they actually are. External audiences are more likely to make positive judgements about them and be more willing to invest resources in them. Organizations often use trendy but misleading names to attract resources (particularly from the uninformed). In recent years, firms have gained a boost in valuation by adopting a name invoking blockchain technology.

As well as enhancing one’s image, bullshitting can also help to enhance self-identity. This is because bullshit can enable bullshitters to conjure a kind of ‘self-confidence trick’. This happens when bullshitters mislead themselves into believing their own bullshit. Self-deception enables individuals to present themselves as much more self-confident than they would otherwise seem if they had to engage in cognitively taxing processes of dual processing (holding in one’s mind both the deceptive statement as well as the truth). The self-confidence which comes from self-deception can aid resource acquisition. For instance, entrepreneurs are encouraged to ignore their objective chances of failure so they can appear self-confident in their search for resources to support their venture.

When bullshit has become part of the formal organization for some time, it can slowly start to seem valuable in and of itself. When this happens, bullshit can be treated as sacred. Sanctification happens when an element of secular life (such as bullshitting) is elevated, a sense of higher meaning is projected into it, and deep existential significance is invested in it.

– André Spicer, Playing the Bullshit Game: How Empty and Misleading Communication Takes Over Organizations, 2020

The beauty of collaborating at human scale

Collective decision making, by equipping a group with democratic rule making tools – granting the group decision making powers over what others can or can’t do leads to a limitation of diversity within the group by definition, but it does not prevent other groups from developing different social operating models.

But if the group is too large for everyone to observe first-hand the impact of specific decisions on all members of the group and to learn from these observations, then democratic rule making can easily result in the tyranny of the majority and in marginalisation and dehumanisation of minorities. Super-human-scale groups are learning disabled by design.

Powered-up super-human-scale societies like ours equate growing in scale and growing in measurable performance with “progress”. The industrialised notion of technological progress is inversely correlated with our collective ability to learn and adapt. 

Collective decision making, by equipping a small (sub) human-scale group with egalitarian democratic rule making tools – granting the group decision making powers over what others can or can’t do leads to a limitation of diversity within the group by definition, but the group is small enough to allow everyone to observe first-hand the impact of specific decisions on all members of the group, and to learn from these observations. Sub human-scale groups are learning enabled by design, and human-scale groups are optimised for learning by design.

Collective decision making and egalitarian democratic rule making tools can be scaled by imposing a human-scale group size limit, for example via a cultural convention to split up a group into two smaller collaborating groups before the limits of human-scale are reached.

Collective decision making at human-scale, making use of tools such as Open Space, in combination de-powered social relationships between individuals and a human-scale group size limit, without any further assumptions about cultural conventions and rules, over time allows for a huge diversity of cultures to emerge that are all optimised for learning within their respective local contexts.

My energy is focused on supporting people and communities in de-powering, and in relearning to trust ecological evolutionary forces at super-human scale rather than to trust the attempts of benevolent “control” by powered-up super-human scale institutions.

Harrison Owen is incredibly skilled at communicating the benefits of Open Space. If we focus on giving people training wheels in Open Space, i.e. training wheels in de-powering, and in rediscovering collective learning at human scale, we incrementally re-acquaint them with the thinking tools for creative collaboration – and this provides an avenue out of the deadly lock-in to paradigmatic cultural inertia. This in turn may shift how humans will treat each other and our non-human contemporaries on the journey towards being composted and recycled as part of the big cycle of life. 

Sadly, a few days ago Michael Dowd died. His philosophy has a lot to offer. His two basic definitions:

Doom 

1. A normal feeling of disgust or dread upon realizing that technological progress and economic growth and development are the root of our predicament, not our way out.
2. A name for the anxiety and fear called forth when living in a corrupt, dysfunctional civilization causing a mass extinction.
3. The mid-point between denial and regeneration . . .  with or without us. 

Post-doom

1. What opens up when we remember who we are and how we got here, accept the inevitable, honor our grief, and prioritize what is  pro-future and soul-nourishing.
2. A fierce and fearless reverence for life and expansive gratitude — even in the midst of abrupt climate mayhem and the runaway collapse of societal harmony, the health of the biosphere, and business as usual.
3. Living meaningfully,  compassionately, and courageously no matter what.

The goal of minimising human and non-human suffering by de-powering is culturally ambitious, and it is life affirming, but it neither requires a long academic learning curve, nor does it have any anthropocentric ambitions in terms of attempting to “save” humanity from the evolutionary forces we have unleashed via the industrialised myth of perpetual technological “progress” and the cult of busyness.

Humans won’t ever be “in control”, but at human scale, in a healthy cultural environment, at least we are optimally equipped to adapt and respond in meaningful ways to rapid ecological changes in our local environment.