Gaia loves making senses

Photo by Yoann Boyer on Unsplash

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

Life

Life creates conditions conducive to life – Janine Benyus

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

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

Spirits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Panpsychism

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

Spiritual traditions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love

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

– Vandana Shiva

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sensitivity profiles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Culture co-evolution

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

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

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

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

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

Culture co-evolution at human scales entails the following:

  1. The emergence of cultural practices between two regularly interacting human animals. Balanced relationships and de-powered dialogues are best understood and visualised as a feedback loop that results in a convergence and entanglement of our internal mental models and greater levels of shared understanding and compassion.

  2. Within a human family or household that includes n human animals there are up to 1/2 n * (n – 1) relationships between human animals the co-evolution of relationships gives rise to additional cultural practices. 

  3. Empirically we know that healthy human cultural organisms consist of multiple families or households that collaborate and live together on daily or weekly basis to form a coherent economic resource sharing unit, i.e. a human scale cultural organism. Within a human scale cultural organism that includes m families there are up to 1/2 m * (m – 1) relationships between families that co-evolve and give rise to additional cultural practices.

  4. Relationships between families consist of relationships between specific people. So at the level of a human scale cultural organism of l human animals and m families there are a total of 1/2 l * (l – 1) relationships between human animals that co-evolve, plus 1/2 m * (m – 1) relationships between families that co-evolve.

  5. Furthermore, empirically we know that human cultural organisms maintain collaborative relationships with a number of other human cultural organisms, which in turn consist of relationships between specific people, resulting in the co-evolution of interacting cultural organisms.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The human spirit within Gaia

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

  1. The human nervous system is a sense making organ that evolved to integrate at human scale into a human scale cultural organism, within which culture operates mainly as an energy saving tool. 

  2. Human cultural organisms save energy by engaging in collaborative niche construction with a conscious primary focus on group wellbeing, and this has allowed humans to colonise and adapt to nearly all terrestrial ecosystems on the planet. 

  3. Collaborative niche construction often even extends to relationships between local human cultural organisms, but it does not scale beyond the cognitive and emotional limitations of human scale. Therefore conflicts easily emerge when the local group size or the local density of groups exceeds these limits. Maintaining egalitarian collaborative relationships between human scale groups is stretching the limits of the human capacities for language and culture.

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

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

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

  1. The primate nervous system is a sense making organ that evolved to integrate into small flexible competitive alliances within the context of a social dominance hierarchy, within which culture operates mainly as a social power amplifier within conflicts. 

  2. Primate alliances amplify social power to weaken the position of social power at the top of the hierarchy, this is the paradigm of “collaborate only to compete”, which introduces an element of opportunistic cooperation that is only just sufficient for maintaining overall group coherence.

  3. Primates do not consciously trust the collective intelligence of the group, and the primary focus of their mental faculties is the navigation of competitive social dynamics within a “collaborate only to compete” paradigm. This limitation, compounded by their lack of symbolic language, prevents them from developing a collective primate group scale repository of cultural wisdom and collective understanding of the local bioregional ecosystem that persists, is transmitted reliably, and evolves over the course of many generations.

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

  1. The course of evolution of the human capacities for language and culture has optimised for continuous collaborative niche construction based on stable relationships within human cultural organisms.

  2. Human gene-culture co-evolution will have favoured the dimensions of variability and diversity that we observe between individual humans today. Human neurodiversity is best studied and understood at human scale.

  3. It only makes sense to explore adaptive levels of human diversity vs maladaptive levels of human diversity or uniformity by comparing human scale cultural organisms.

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

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

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

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

Becoming aware of cultural bias

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

Human cultural output as part of Gaia

  1. the humanities

  2. mathematics

  3. statistics and engineering

Human attempts at understanding Gaia

  1. global studies and political science

  2. the earth sciences

  3. physics

  4. chemistry

  5. ecology

  6. all of biology minus WEIRD bias in evolutionary biology

  7. the medical sciences minus WEIRD psychiatry

  8. the social sciences minus WEIRD psychology

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

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

  1. WEIRD economics (economics & business administration)

  2. the psychologically “normal(ised)” WEIRD human (psychiatry & psychology)

  3. digital automation of WEIRD behaviour (computer science & data science)

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

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

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

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

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

Reviving trust in humanity

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

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

  1. Using persuasive techniques to encourage another to adopt an opinion (ABA and the entire behaviourist bag of tricks) – rather than listening and engaging in deeper compassionate dialogue to understand the other.

  2. Casting doubt on observations and assessments of another, in domains or contexts in which the other is more intimately familiar with the context – rather than listening and respecting the contextually informed observations of the other.

  3. Ignoring questions that express a desire from another to understand motivations and expressed feelings – rather than openly sharing motivations and feelings.

  4. There are likely further symptoms …

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

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

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

The result is an epidemic of self hate and shame. 

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

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

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

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

  1. Making people feel better about themselves by identifying other people who have harmed them, which inevitably involves some attribution of blame, and thereby to some extent it distracts from clearly seeing the systemic patterns of intergenerational trauma that are at work.

  2. Encouraging people to believe that working on “themselves” will eventually allow them to become “successful”, and thereby pushing people back into the environment that is ruled by the toxic rules for “success”.

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

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

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

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

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

  1. Minimise the human and non-human suffering on the downwards slope of homo economicus, and 

  2. Maximise joy as part of the metamorphisis of human scale cultural organisms in the cultural compost heap.

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

  1. to equip people to be more gentle with themselves, 

  2. to reassure them that you know that they are doing the best they can within the bounds of their human cognitive and emotional limits, 

  3. and to remind them that everyone can contribute to the metamorphosis by letting go of internalised ableism, by appreciating and actively supporting the work of those who are the agents within the metamorphosis, and by relying on non-violent resistance as needed to prevent avoidable harm and to support the dying process of the system.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Partnership 101, Riane Eisler, 2021

Making sense of the world

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Join us!

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

The post Gaia loves making senses appeared first on NeuroClastic.

More can be found here: Read More
/0 Comments/by