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[Music] [Music] The Meta crisis is the historically specific threat to truth beauty and
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goodness caused by our persistent misunderstanding Mis valuing and misappropriating of reality it arises from the material and
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spiritual exhaustion of modernity it is a multifaceted delusion it is the crisis within between and beyond our existing
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conception of Crisis and it manifests institutionally and culturally to the detriment of life on Earth the metac crisis is something about the our relationship to all of the
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crisis in the world so it's reflexive it's inherently reflexive it's about talking through thinking through how does human nature relate to this thing now that's quite distinct from poly
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crisis or permac crisis or all these other terms what's different about metac crisis is it acknowledges human interiority and relationality as a fundamental part of the problem or the problematic I should say the other way
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of looking meta crisis there are many actually but you can see it as the sign that modernity is ending and so this expression of Zack Stein's time between worlds that we're in a time between
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worlds captures that um and it's because we're in a time between worlds that things don't make sense things begin to break down and and this is where again you can get into Jean gier's notion of the mental
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rational function breaking down which in plain language is intellectually we're not up to it anymore the intellectual function is is not not succeeding in making sense of the world the world is eclipsing or going beyond their capacity
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to make sense of it and these are all signs that are existing form of Consciousness is somehow uh in need of evolution in need of growing in some way but I also think meta is kind of alive
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like I I I don't I think there a kind of participatory knowing of the meta crisis when you put it as a proposition and say Define the metac crisis it becomes One More Concept among a million Concepts the metac crisis is your daily
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experience of a world falling apart it's your it's your incredulity towards how weird everything's becoming both a kind of Rapid technological growth uh and you know the combination of synthetic biology and Ai
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and virtual reality changing the life world and then you have things like Gene editing and syn you know so on that are actually Changing Life as such and then you have um maybe a new phase of
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geological time the academics are still arguing about it but for all intents and purposes the Holo scene has ended this the stable geological period that has lasted many thousands of years is now uh
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unstable and we're in entering Uncharted Territory and you can see that in the planetary boundary framework very clearly but you can also feel it the quick definition would be
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something like the metac crisis is all the crisis put together right and people go oh oh I see I see but they don't see right cuz it's not really the end of it that's just the beginning of the conversation the metac crisis is also in
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the way you make sense of the world the way you feel it in in imote in relation to it the metac crisis is in your incapacity to fully articulate and narrate the self in this
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context and The Meta crisis is also a you know coextensive with Co arising with this particular historical Epoch so it's not as though there haven't been metac crisis before I mean arguably the
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time of Christ was a kind of metac Crisis if you think about an occup occupying Roman Empire a kind of religious fervor people waiting for you know the Messiah and then this person appears apparently doing Miracles
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everyone's totally confused right just as we are kind of now so one of many examples were it's not like we haven't had historical turbulence before is there something distinct about today yes
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that we're actually destroying our only home our one precious planet in the infinite region of space is under threat not of annihilation necessarily but of being in a habitat for human life that's
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in question now forms of technology developing so rapidly that you can get into a world of autonomous weapons that really can cause massive destruction so what's different today is the degree of
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risk to the planet as a whole that's one distinct feature of the metac crisis but arguably we had this with nuclear weapons as well so it's different but at the same
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time I like to speak of the metac crisis in a way that doesn't just leave you Dazed and Confused and and looking as a passive subject at at a kind of unfamiliar object saying that there that's the
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metac crisis ah what do I do that's not the way to go the metac crisis is our historical inheritance we're born into this it's the this generation that perceives it and feels
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it it's the set of cards we have to play it's not something we can fix the problem with the crisis framing is that it's still a kind of tacit problem solution mentality that would be misunderstanding the nature of the metac crisis what's
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going on is a very slow historical process that's culminating in a certain way and beginning to transform into something else the nature of what it transforms into will depend whether we
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survive and thrive or collapse I believe about 90% of what I just said but there's another part of me that says are we sure this is the time between worlds is modernity really ending you know if I told I don't know
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Elon Musk or Sam Alman that modernity is ending they just laugh at me right so I'm thinking of the other side saying modernity is not ending what are you talking about it's just taking off if anything technology is going to
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radically change the world and solve a lot of these problems now I don't feel that it's not how I'm politically socially culturally intellectually oriented but it's possible um it's possible that you solve something like
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nuclear fusion and have abundant energy it's conceivable that um a lot of the illnesses that lead us to suffer and die will be dealt with it's conceivable that the powers that be
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that somehow at the moment seems so cut off from the rest of the world will be in some sense democratized and brought back into the fold such that the great benefits that
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that are currently uring in a very small number of people are shared more widely and people might insist on that um so I'm not sort of predisposed to feel that collapse
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is is is sort of absolutely necessary on the other hand I do feel a kind of collapse is underway and the challenge for us is coll collapse is underway what does a transformative response to
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collapse look like but look I say this in a a kitchen in a suburb of London living quite a full healthy life in a safe Democratic more or less
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country um so there's a lot of incredulity here there's a lot of um dissonance confusion that we live as if living a normal life while watching news in our our pocket a kind
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of planet in our pocket that says everything's falling apart and yet we go to the shop and we buy our milk and we walk back home as if things were normal so that's kind of the metac
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crisis too it's the experience of of confusion that's now baked into our lives as we hear about our world collapsing on the news and on our phones
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but often live as if life could carry on forever I was formed as many many millions of people were with a notion of what normal looks like and a lot of what's going on is
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like kind of clamoring to get normal back like solve these problems you know like make de make democracy stronger make the market work but just get rid of the environmental externalities
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um you know yes there's problems with you know Mass immigration but surely we can just build more houses and you know we've there's a kind of notion that make do in menend is enough right but many
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don't feel that in their hearts right many feel this is something altogether different now I think what's going on in our kind of community in our world is that most people are reading the position and seeing that the make do in
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Men story doesn't doesn't sound like it's true it seems very unlikely it seems more likely that there'll either be in the in the next years decades it's
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hard to say exactly how quickly but forms of dissolution and collapse in various parts of the world you know you're already seeing people dying of heat deaths and people losing their
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homes to floods and forest fires and and we don't we haven't really seen AI biting properly yet on the labor market but that will begin to happen and we see deep fakes affecting Democratic
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elections and that will happen more like the Nobel Prize winner Maria ressa feels that 2024 will be the last year of proper Democratic elections because she sees the problem of these Technologies
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basically you can't trust public opinion that the notion of universal suffrage is compromised by the fact that the information stream is is polluted uh with falsehoods and so the legitimacy that
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underpins democracy is in question right and so you get problems with authoritarianism and so on if that seems confusing it's because it is it's because all these things are happening at once most people in our sector of the
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internet in our sort of world feel intuitively that something deeper is going on and we look to history sometimes to see what is this like what kind of transition is this
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like and there are many ways of doing it but one would be the axal age one would be to say there was a moment in time about give or take 500 years before Christ where there was the early signs
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of systematic thought that we sort of moved out of a kind of Mythos into a kind of logos where we began to actually have sort of reason
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and and writing and um we would turn from a barter economy to money and there was a move towards the cities away from the country and um in in our Consciousness the sort of notion of the
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individual was kind of born um and then at this time Buddha appeared and L Sue and and so on and many many of the Greek philosophers and around that time it was
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as if the whole world although it wasn't evenly spread developed a new kind of Consciousness and I think a lot of people in my world feel something else like that is happening and it's a very
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audacious somewhat absurd thing to think but it roughly is what I think it feels more true than that we can muddle through with the existing framework so when people people ask me what I'm doing
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sometimes because I did a lot of work on climate change I have a lot of contacts in that world and they're working on you know getting the government to sign up to Net Zero by 2030 or whatever the latest
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thing is and I'm like well you can do that if you like but I think something altogether deeper is happening and that you're not likely to succeed that way I place more hope in a fundamental
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transformation of Consciousness than I do in dealing with things with the institutional and cultural structure we have now it's worth saying a bit more about time between worlds because it's uh like I say the
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expression was first muted in a book title by Zachary Stein called education in a time between worlds and the term is very charming and so people use it as a Shand for this period of time but it's important to understand that it it has
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precursors so in sociology particularly gramsky there's this notion of the interum where one thing has ended but the next thing hasn't yet been [Music]
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born in anthropology there's the notion of the Lial which is really fascinating for our community because what what it is to be in the Lial is for an ethnographer who is from one culture
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let's say a regular Western culture goes into a tribal context or an indigenous context and he's trying to uh do deep ethnographic work so he's trying to sort of live like them with them and observe
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them participant or observation but there's a period of time when they're neither they're so incon in that world that they almost forget what it was like to be in the prior world but they're not yet one of them and that's
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what they mean by Lial and anthropology and in some ways that's how a lot of our community is it's like we don't entirely belong to the world as it is now although we're still part of it and yet there isn't there isn't really another
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thing that we're fully belonging in so we're in this in between phase the other thing to say about time between worlds is it's not just a poetic sound bite there's quite a lot of empirical work underpinning it so Emanuel wallerstein's
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World System Dynamics is one of these sources and that's to do with understanding the world system as trade flows and it's actually very political analysis it's to do with the exploitation of the poor World by the
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rich world and following the pattern of that over time and seeing that it lacks durability that it will inevitably collapse and then you have work by people like Peter turchin to do a secular Cycle Theory at some similar
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theory of History he sometimes calls it Cleo dnamic which is the sort of quantitative history of looking at past patterns and seeing how they repeat today and measuring things like income inequality and uh autocratic governance
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and so on and beginning to sort of do a quantitive measure when these this number of things happen Things Fall Apart so the time in Worlds is not just a feeling there's also a kind of empirical underpinning to it and at its
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heart there's an analysis of modernity right there's and what the hell is that right now I'm not sure I can adequately describe modernity but um habas speaks of it as an orientation
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towards the future and a big part of what's happening in our world is people are not so sure about the future it's not clear where this ship is sailing where we're going right so to be in a
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time between worlds in that sense and the reason some people call it metamodern is is that if the if if the orientation to the Future and the progress narrative is in in a big part of what modernity is about
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first of all we can't see the future very clearly and we're if anything we're a bit weary of it and secondly it's not at all clear its progress it might well be regress and that's why it's it's between worlds and then you also have
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though rather than just W is me everything's falling apart there are these Wellsprings of renewal you know there are these people doing different things things like I'm thinking here of maybe Joel Brewer who's currently trying
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to get a river back to life in barichara columia and that's exciting because he's kind of given up on the nation state he's like we need to start building the Biore Regional um hubs and then there
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are many bio regions around the world if more people start to work around bio regions you might find a new form of governance emerging then you have this notion of like cosmal localism which is something to do with being wise about
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your production patterns so that if something is very heavy to transport you don't transport it you use it locally but also it's more more philosophically it's kind of like you focus locally on your Niche and your immediate needs in
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your community but you're connected to this much bigger cosmological framework because of the internet and you have other ideas you know there's ontological Mutiny it's a term of bioom aism that we somehow have
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to just break out of this kind of collective illusion that we're part of um my colleague Evo mench also speaks about this uh he jokes that we're collectively living a life that no longer exists and a lot of us feel that
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way when then Bonita has work on complex potential States something to do with intuiting potential quite a Dost go with the energy kind of notion so it's not as though there's no ideas it's not as
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though no one has any idea what happens next but if you look at it at scale in terms of where the power is who has power now particularly technological power it is daunting um and it takes
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quite a lot of courage and resilience not to just give into despair I came across it through my friend Zachary Stein and I think he he worked on it with Mark GNE and it's to do with what what they call the Stations
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of the self and it's not really a developmental Theory but it's more a way of describing a sort of existential interiority of the human being as it goes through life
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and the stages are roughly pre- tragic tragic and post- tragic pre- tragic is something like we can fix every problem everything's going to be okay don't don't fixate on your worries everything will work out in the end we can do it
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kind of mentality so arguably a lot of techno optimism is Prett tragic it's sort of like not really contending with just how compromise everything already is the tragic though is to be
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lost and broken by despair the tragic is to be unable to function because you're so thoroughly depressed when everything seems to be going wrong but the problem
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with tragic is you get stuck in them completely stuck in them and the claim here is that it's not that it's better to be post- tragic as such but just there is also a state of sort of
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sensibility available to us that doesn't have the pre- tragic uh nothing's wrong everything will be fine but nor is it lost forever in the kind
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of the implosion of the tragic it's it it reclaims the agency of the pre- tragic informed by the understanding of the tragic to live in a way that recognizes
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that suffering and pain is an endemic future of Life humans screw things up all the time we can't help it almost I believe one of the best definitions of sin for what
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it's worth is from Francis Bufford he calls it the human propensity to things up and it's a real feature of human life so the the post tragic recognizes that as something that we
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can't escape there will be no Eden as such um there will still be Wars there will still be sociopaths there will still be narcissists there'll still be corruption and yet you don't collapse in
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despair because of that because it's not really your work to do to solve that that's baked into reality as the the oppositional principles that gives rise to creative possibilities and so on what the post tragic is about is
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rediscovering the beauty on the other side of the suffering to see that somehow the soul is formed through those contests those
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[Music] battles at scale things were so bad we have to rethink that's where it comes into structures of Consciousness and mind
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because uh reason is powerful and good science when it's working well is important and we shouldn't wish these things away but what is true and I think Paul Marshall does a particularly good
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job at this in his book uh complex integral realism he speaks about the biases of the modern mind and what he's doing there is fleshing out Jean gaber's notion of of the of the evolution of
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Consciousness and and the the mind in its mental rational function breaking down and he's spelling it out and he speaks about the sort of uh various kinds of biases but the essence of it
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the way he sums it up is that the modern mind got very good at standing back and like again like the term poly crisis it's all standing back and looking at it but it lost its way in terms of looking
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within uh which is more about the depth of the psyche the Deep interior and it lost its way in terms of let's say Cosmo vision and metaphysics it stopped asking what are our
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assumptions about the fabric of reality right um and those two moves the looking within and looking Beyond are the other two meanings of meta which is why I think metac crisis is the term to use
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because that's the work we have to do it's like what is inside the imaginal realm what is the psyche how do we know it better how do we live through it so that we have less need of consumer
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durables to live well that we don't need to meet our emotional needs by buying something new necessarily and at the same time the sort of broadly liberal imaginary that says have your religion
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if you want but keep it out of the public realm as far as you can doesn't seem to be working very well it would appear that we need a view of the world
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that is altogether more Enchanted more profoundly I think personal it's not like anything goes it's not like you surrender your
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intellect or Surrender Your critical faculties it's just that you realize that the story you've been told about material reality cause and consequence space and time it's less than the full
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story and because it's less than the full story with all due discernment with all due care with all due critical caution be open to the possibility that the world is radically different from
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the one you imagined so when I have something like a Serendipity or a uh a feeling that the universe is somehow talking to me I can explain it away but I prefer not to and
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I don't have to uh the universe may well be enchanted and there may well be a form of relationship between the cosmos and us that we need to reconnect with
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and at scale and quickly so that uh the major Collective action problems we face feel different and they feel different not just to the niche people who are
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complaining but to the powers to be as well you can't really know so in the absence of not being able to know with certainty do you opt for a kind of
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conventional view of how things are that is still culturally hegemonic or do you venture out into other ways of knowing that seem less
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socially validated but perhaps more emotionally rewarding and credible and personally I do the L um but I do think it's delicate because
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you can have psychosis you know me the structure mental structure can just collapse and I have schizophrenia in my family I don't want to wish away the mental structures lightly right I'm very
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happy for uh sanity and reason it's just that I also feel that um the world is much more than we've been led to believe I believe Consciousness is an ontological primary a fundamental
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feature of reality I think value and meaning are inherent to the fabric of reality not just socially constructed I'm at ease with using the word god though I don't quite know what I mean by
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that but I do feel there's a kind of there's a kind of relationship between the whole and the parts that's constantly happening and um sometimes you can feel yourself in the hole in a way that's
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quite personal and enlivening I would just hope that when we try and think about the future people in the social change World they often don't go there they they stick within
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the narrow confines of what's politically possible and culturally acceptable but I think a lot of people in our Network feel instinctively that's not enough that you have to actually widen the scope of the inquiry because
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only then do you get the quality of idea and the and the the kind of institutional and cultural Innovation that might be more worthy of the scale of the challenges we Face there's that old line by Charles
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ketering that a problem well stated is half solved which I always thought was only about half true um I don't think it's the whole truth you you need to do more than specify the problem um and we're a bit
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beyond problems we're in a kind of predicament now but still all very well but what do we do right so one thing I've suggested is that trying to get Beyond a crisis
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mentality seems to me to be quite important this has come to me quite recently but I've noticed that the people that I admire are not fixing ated with crisis people I'm drawn to these days are not those who are pointing out
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just how dangerous it all is they're people who are already underway doing something different people who are actually innovating in a way that prefigures the next world are the ones that I admire the most and very
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few of them are motivated by the language of Crisis and I find this very intriguing because at a purely conceptual level some would argue that the entire thrust
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of modernity the entire sort of engine that drives the progress narrative and the future orientation is the Perpetual construction and solving of
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Crisis um and this is through War this is through sort of capital investment um it happens in institution building it's like this is a big crisis let's solve it by doing this and that's
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how the whole thing keeps moving over many many centuries um but where we are now is we can't keep on talking of Crisis and solving them that's actually rather than being the solution that's you begin to
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see that's part of the problem that entire way of framing things instead you got to look for potential right you got to look where is where where are the where is the
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scope to do things fundamentally differently in a transformative way and I mean that in in a specific way not just as a kind of rhetorical flourish but transformative in the sense that the
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underlying form of it the underlying reality of it you go beyond in some [Music] way going from the nation state to the bio region is an example of
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that um getting out of a university Department speaking about sustainability and actually having your own Farm where you actually um model how to grow crops isn't example of that creating a pop-up
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School rather than getting a job in a university Department as part of that creating new language so let's say Nora bateson's aani pois for example which is
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a kind of tending to what is latent seeing what's unseen and moving with that in some way is another example um these this these are these
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are the things to get behind and at a more spirit spiritual level is to do with calling right uh I don't know how else to put this other than to say that there's a place where Carl yung's idea of
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individuation meets elanar ostrom's idea of the functional Commons the solving of collective action problems or Collective action Solutions there a place where individuation meets Collective action
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Solutions and you can think of it as a kind of collective individuation and what I mean by that is the distinction between the I and the Wii begins to break down and not in a coercive there's no individual anymore but rather the
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very notion of what an individual is is at the part of a collective and responding to its needs the very notion of what a collective is is something that gives rise to individuated beings that's what we want to get to but to get
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there I do believe you have to tune in to something more Cosmic which is something like your own sense of what you're meant to be doing now not everyone is let's say spiritually m musical not everyone hears that
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frequency but for a lot of people I think they do sense it and they may even be in denial about it but they feel there's something they're meant to be doing um and I guess I feel the more
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that we tune into that and of course listen for feedback from the world otherwise you get caught in narcissistic spirals of self-indulgence but look at what the world appears to need think of what you
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have to offer it and that's where speaking of something like Collective individuation and it's also about potential it's not just about solving a problem to prop up the status quo it's
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like what is actually transforming the world changing the underlying form going Beyond it creatively subversively transgressively even that's the kind of work that excites
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me hope lies not so much in the massive armies and the big plans but in the people tending to everyday life now this this is a it's quite an uncomfort I find it quite a difficult thought to to Bear
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because there's a part of me that is more conventionally masculine uh in the sense of like trying and disclose the problem and fix it but I'm growing out of that I sort of
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feel that's actually not the right way to approach things great to map things if you can and see as clearly as you can but the hope lies from something more like tending digging where you stand
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tending to what's yours to deal with now that doesn't mean shutting off the rest of the world but it does mean asking deep play Given that context what is my work in this context and that's gets
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back to the cosmol local idea so it's something like this it's not a big Grand action plan it's trusting in the innovation of smaller groups for those who more theoretically inclined um
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in the world of hyper objects and by hyperobjects we mean these almost unintelligible ideas like the climate crisis and the pandemic and The Meta crisis these things we can't quite get our head around but we still live every
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day in the world of hyper objects you need hypos subjects and by hypos subjects it's not hyper agents it's not you don't need more Elon musks you need more people who are turning away from
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the miasma and the drama of the global action problem global global situation towards the spiritual calling of the work they're meant to do in the context they have but not in a politically naive
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way in a way that is deeply informed by the need to generate a new [Music]
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reality
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