Deactivating the H2Minus Vortex

Why visionary philanthropists should support innovations in spiritual practice.

This post is an update on the intellectual foundations of Perspectiva’s work, and it grows out of Perspectiva in Ten Premises which we shared ten months ago.

I might express things slightly differently today, particularly on the first point, but I still hold to the arguments outlined in that post (and slides). The premises are a textured way of describing the metacrisis and an attempt to operationalise how to work on it, by linking project activities, new practices, and publications to one or more premises.

Each of these ideas entails the others, but in what follows I give definition and character to the arena in which ‘the work’ in premises five to nine applies.

So if I am asked:

• What do you mean by ‘we need to get out of our own way’?

• Why is the method ‘education but not as we know it’?

• Why might civilisational renewal depend upon ‘a new metaphysics’?

• Why do we need ‘not action but the power to create context’?

• Why does praxis have to be ‘profoundly collective but deeply personal’?

To these queries, I offer a counter-question: “Have you met the H2Minus Vortex?”

The H2Minus Vortex is how power protects itself, capital sustains itself, and society perpetuates itself. The term was first coined in The Inner Life of the Future and the point of the term is to disclose the nature of stuckness, or more technically, to diagnose our paradigmatic immunity to change. The term stems from the three-horizon model about dispositions towards the future in the present, and I get into the details of the model below. First, I want to prepare the ground to show how the H2minusvortex is needed to help us see what we might otherwise prefer to ignore.

(As you’re about to see, the H2minus vortex phenomenon is Protean, hard to pin down or catch, and the idea appears in various guises. Like meta-crisis, or meta crisis or metacrisis, the terminology hasn’t yet settled into a final or canonical syntactical form, so sometimes it’s just ‘the vortex’, sometimes it’s more than one word, sometimes it is capitalised, sometimes with a dash for the minus, and the same applies to ‘H2plus’. I am sorry if this inconsistency causes suffering, especially to copyeditors but I want to honour the feeling that this idea is still literally taking shape).

***

I was once asked what I would say to the assembled leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, and I realised I could not say anything that would make a difference. That might sound defeatist, but it’s important to be clear-sighted about what is possible, and to be able to distinguish between performative success and the work that needs to be done.

There is a scene from an old Hollywood blockbuster - Independence Day - that helps to make this point by analogy. It’s probably worth five minutes of your time. If you can’t bear it, the critical idea is this: When there is no apparent way forward you have to overcome immunity to change, and it’s worth expending extraordinary energy to create opportunity, even for uncertain rewards:

I have used some version of this clip in public talks because it helps to disclose what is called for today, and what has been called for for decades. Three years ago, after one of many authoritative scientific reports on climate change was released and reported, again, I wrote the following as part of a foreword to a Perspectiva essay.

“Like the famous Sherlock Holmes case of the dog that didn’t bark, the most important message of the 2021 assessment report is that one that is not there. The message that jumps out to me above all others is that previous IPCC reports, going back to 1990, have not been heeded. Where is the report on that? Because that’s the one we really need. Where is the report with IPCC-level rigour and authority that explains the gap between what we know and what we do at scale? Where is the widely reported executive summary that highlights the glaring absence of the pre-political We invoked by scientists? Where is the public awareness campaign on the competing commitments arising from democratic mandates? Where is the world stage where we grapple with endemic corruption that breaches trust, cultural conditioning that binds us to our consumer trance, and targeted technological addiction that keeps us diverted? Where are the daytime television conversations about how fascinating and tragic it is that we get in our way, and what it might take to get out of it?”

Perspectiva is already talking with a prospective academic partner to compile and write such a report and we are looking for more allies. The point applies more broadly though, and takes me back to the imagined speech at Davos.

With some notable exceptions, the worldview of the financial and technocratic elite seems impervious to the transformation in perspective and praxis that now seem necessary to avert the great unravelling, by which I mean a mixture of ecological collapse and war. My heart tells me that other possible futures are not so bleak, but viable and desirable futures are outliers, and not readily achievable in the context of the hegemonic worldview we have today and the delusion and concentrations of power that characterise it.

Niches of alternative sensibilities abound, and there is plenty of hope if hope’s your thing. Yet if we are, as Clifford Geertz once put it “Animals suspended in webs of significance that we ourselves have spun”, then it’s not so easy. It’s no wonder we struggle not to think through our inherited and encultured faith in reason, science, progress, and our orientation towards the future. Modernity has been weaving its web through our psyches for hundreds of years.

We should be kind to ourselves. It is no wonder that we struggle to remain open to the possibility that our sense of normal life might destroy the world we love. This is impossible knowledge. So we deny it. The poet Ruth Padel captured the spirit of this impossible knowledge in a climate poetry night I was involved in:

"I am the tragic mask. I am how you defend yourself from what it is catastrophe to have to know."

I could offer the Davos crowd some tasty intellectual candy to make plausible nightmare scenarios palatable. Perhaps I could wax lyrical about the need for a global Bildung movement, or I could say something about the need to realise that this one world is also three worlds in disguise - systems, souls and society. Yet most of what I could say would bounce off professional shields and epistemic force fields, just like the alien spacecraft. And whichever ideas made it through the first line of defence would soon be denatured and absorbed by state and market logic, and electoral calculus. (It’s noteworthy that in The Ministry for the Future, one of our better novels about contending with the climate crisis, the world leaders at Davos are kidnapped, with the protagonists arguing this was necessary to get their attention. (*I am not advocating this!*.)

What is called for in our world leaders is something more like metanoia - a transformation of heart and mind, renewed perception and valueception, and through that spiritual shift, a change of political priorities. Some would say that’s naively idealistic, and it’s hard to disagree. The challenge is then to minimise harm in the short term with existing institutions and sensibilities (including law) while also forging a movement that can take on that transformative task across society. That means new forms of collective agency informed by a transformation of perspective and wiser priorities (this is ‘democratising hyperagency’ or premise eight).

But how do we even begin to get there? This is where the H2minus analysis helps.

**

The H2 Minus Vortex is the fate of most new ideas and initiatives, especially those trying to forge a different kind of world that don’t initially serve hegemonic economic and political interests, but end up doing so. If you are working in civil society and trying to change the world but not simultaneously working to deactivate the vortex, there’s a good chance it will swallow you. 😱

The idea of the H2minus vortex is an iteration of the three-horizon model originally devised by Bill Sharpe, though he does not use the term. The emphasis on paying close attention to what happens in Horizon Two is clear however in Kate Raworth’s excellent summary of the model. I see my job here as naming and describing the phenomenon more fully, and Perspectiva’s job is to continue working on it.

The three-horizon model is more dispositional than temporal. It is not so much about the present, the near future, and the distant future, though that’s not a disastrous understanding and sometimes works as a shorthand. In Bill Sharpe’s original formulation the idea is more subtle and generative because it’s about three main attitudes or dispositions to the future, in the present.

Horizon One is broadly about a managerial approach to business as usual in the present and near future. So much modern commentary on our predicament involves a kind of triage: prioritising resources, solving the most immediate problems, and perpetual crisis management. Most of ‘the news’ is about Horizon One and part of why it feels bleak is because solutions at this level are losing credibility. That said, Horizon One includes virtues like prudence, protection, and organisation and applies in domains like law and order, governance and medicine. We should not knock it lightly, but we need to be capable of moving beyond it when the need arises, which is the case today.

Thankfully work is underway with the entrepreneurial spirit of Horizon Two, our field of adjacent possibility in technology and culture. And there is real potential there to forge a better world. However, since work in Horizon Two is sometimes funded by national governments, dependent on the investment-return cycle, and infused with the spirit and shadows of modernity, the best of such innovation is invariably coopted by hegemonic power and managed back into the logic of business as usual to shore up the status quo (‘H2minus’) rather than forging a path to a transformed future (‘H2plus’).

H2plus work is rare because the vision of the third horizon has to manifest in a tangible form as innovation in the second horizon, where it typically depends on the financial power and institutional dispositions of the first horizon. This predicament is a tension for all non-profit organisations, including Perspectiva, who rely on philanthropy, and this is why visionary philanthropists should ask themselves where they see themselves in the three horizon model. I don’t know how to quantify this claim here, but I strongly suspect most philanthropy is H2minus in spirit, playing at innovation while clinging to the status quo.

Without the requisite vision and power, most potentially transformative initiatives disappear or become effectively managed out of existence and coopted back into the first horizon. For instance, through commodification the mindfulness revolution became ‘McMindfulness’, and the digital public square of Twitter that served a democratic function was also a commercial company and is now a decaying Billionaire’s playground called X. H2minus also applies when organisations performatively care about something other than profit to keep making a profit (eg ‘greenwashing’) or when they repurpose something that initially had an explicitly social purpose for commercial ends (as OpenAI just did).

H2plus innovation is what we need, but it’s rare because it refers to the kinds of generative, prefigurative and transgressive sensibility that can resist the H2minus vortex and help to create a transformed world. H2plus work is pulled by a countervailing attractor(H3) that says: let’s move away from this(H1) towards that(H3). That kind of innovation is difficult because political, economic and technological power is invested in the H2-/H1 nexus that creates societal immunity to change.

A further example. I enjoy listening to The Rest is Politics podcast which is now wildly popular. The conversation is almost all Horizon One gossip, with occasional forays into new ideas or initiatives in Horizon Two. Whenever something more transformative or visionary from Horizon Three is mentioned, it is framed to sound politically impossible and therefore unreasonable - it is managed out of existence. This was the case with Rory Stewart’s handling of Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics, discussed here (I am a big fan of Rory in general, but I think he has a blind spot here). In fact that podcast conversation is a good example of how the H2minus vortex operates. Kate is saying the third horizon is necessary and we know its (ecological and social) constraints and should work towards it. Rory responds as if utilising a psychotherapeutic defence mechanism, and renders the argument into a second horizon scenario with some ungenerous assumptions to make it seem implausible; he attributes to Kate ideas she is merely indicating might be necessary and desirable rather than things that have to happen immediately; but Rory frames the proposition as an immediate cessation of growth in the developed world and the equalisation of living standards with the developed world, and then he says that’s won’t work in the first horizon - we literally can’t manage it. There are real democratic and practical obstacles towards achieving anything like Doughnut economics at scale, and Rory might defend his position by saying it’s disingenuous of Kate not to reckon with the political implications of her economic vision. Maybe. But even if that’s right, what was missing was the kind of intellectual flexibility and imaginative playfulness that gives H2plus a chance to breathe, to find its form and strength before the H2minus vortex swallows it up. Without letting people play in the world of H2plus - “how might this necessary and desirable thing become possible” - H3 will never come into being.

The idea of the H2minusvortex helps us think about why governments are failing to avert ecological collapse, and why it is so difficult to change the world at scale. The strategic challenge for civil society organisations like Perspectiva is to model the kinds of insight and inquiry that weaken the H2-/H21 nexus and inspire and strengthen the H2+/H3 nexus in ways that create different forms of power and generate unprecedented collaboration.

‘The H2minus vortex’ might sound niche or technical, but it’s the way of the world, and it helps to appreciate the otherwise annoying French saying: Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose (the more things change, the more they stay the same).

If that line is the motto of the H2minusvortex, what follows is an attempt to discover ‘H2plusvictory’ or ‘H2pluspeace’ (I’m playing…) and the alternative motto comes from Rainier Maria Rilke in Letters to a Young Poet (1929):

The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.

The H2minusvortex and the metacrisis

The reality of the H2minus vortex helps to explain why the latter Perspectiva premises above (5-9) are not niche and nice-to-have, but centrally relevant to all work concerned with viable and desirable futures. These ostensibly philosophical premises are emerging fields of practice required to help deactivate the H2minus vortex and make an H2plus pathway to a better world possible.

The vortex has a specific explanatory function and should not be confused or conflated with Moloch, wicked problems, the superorganism, the polycrisis, or other tropes that describe humanity’s predicament. The H2Minus Vortex is something quite specific to the metacrisis, which I describe as follows:

The metacrisis is the historically specific threat to truth, beauty, and goodness caused by our persistent misunderstanding, misvaluing, and misappropriating of reality. The metacrisis is the crisis within and between all the world’s major crises, a root cause that is at once singular and plural, a multi-faceted delusion arising from the spiritual and material exhaustion of modernity that permeates the world’s interrelated challenges and manifests institutionally and culturally to the detriment of life on earth.

Regarding the metacrisis, the ‘H2MV’ is the operative principle of ‘the crisis within and between all the world’s major crises’. The vortex is about how a worldview permeates our actions at every level and keeps itself going, even when, and especially when, those actions are ostensibly about changing the world. Regarding Perspectiva’s third premise - we can and must act in three different kinds of reality - the vortex is systems and society dancing in perpetuity towards their destruction, unable to change their ways by themselves. It is the task of the soul to change the tune and thereby change the dance. And yet the soul is implicated in this music that it cannot always hear. There is subtle work to be done, and the fact that it can’t be done by eight billion people does not mean we should not start trying. H2plus is always an experiment.

The H2MinusVortex in Action:

I see the H2MV everywhere, but a good example is the idea of a universal basic income. That idea is potentially H2+, but it is advocated by Tech Billionaires to justify mass unemployment through what they see as ‘inevitable’ technological innovation, rather than as a premise of social policy that might begin to reduce inequality and reorder power across society.

I also noticed the spirit of H2minus recently when trying to choose a good book title for a publication we’ll soon be announcing. The strong words that reach the mass market like ‘leadership’ and ‘progress’ and ‘future’ are often precisely the words that are getting in the way of other ways of seeing and being. Yet if you choose titles in language forms that seem less recognisable or important your books may go unread.

As I’ve indicated before, I believe the inner development goals might prove to be H2minus precisely because they are so popular with existing forms of power, but I wish them well, and time will tell. It is also possible in principle for H2- innovation to transform itself into H2+ if a critical mass of people in the H2MV notice what’s happening and begin to practice together such that a third horizon becomes a shared lived reality. What’s the vision? What’s the future? In answering those questions the reality of the H2minusvortex becomes clearer.

To keep this lengthy post readable, I have relegated a thousand words on two further examples - on human rights and green growth - to an optional footnote on how the vortex operates in legal and economic innovation.¹ The point of all these examples however is that the vortex operates as resistance to paradigmatic immunity to change because, for instance, it “transgresses property rights” or leads to “lower living standards” and so it goes, the language of H1 invites an H2- outcome.

I don’t know exactly what the third horizon holds for us, though I speculate on our Entelchy here. I am fairly sure that any viable future entails a move away from materialism in all its guises, however, and I examine related issues in The Flip, The Formation and the Fun and in The Inner Life of the Future which includes the following reflection:

In one reading of the model, it is the visionary who lives in the third horizon (in the present!) who provides the inspiration and imaginative resources to overcome the coercive cooption and systemic inertia of horizon one on horizon two. Any viable ‘third attractor’ will need inspiration from the imaginative possibilities of ‘the third horizon’.

Without some vision that is worthy of our better natures and aware of our worse natures, it is almost inevitable that societal innovation becomes assimilated, rather than leading to deeper lasting qualitative change. Some call this vision a sacred canopy, some a new social imaginary, and others call it a new metaphysics. It sounds abstract, but it has very real effects. One major challenge of our times is therefore work and play of all kinds that speaks not just to triage in the first horizon or attempted transition in the second horizon, but to transformation inspired by visions of the third horizon, which means seeing beyond the existing form of society as it manifests in the present…

I think the naive view is that the third attractor is a kind of picture we can paint that will rally the eight billion troops of planet Earth to heroically cooperate to save our only home. Clearly, that’s not going to work, if only because of the impossible we. But if the third attractor is too subtle, rarified, or niche, it is hard to imagine it shifting incumbent power in a way that overcomes the H2minus vortex. So it seems the third attractor needs to be the optimal level of implicit and explicit so as not to be constituted by necrotic ideas but still tangible enough to be inspiring and resilient so that it can resist the H2minus vortex.

The point is that vision is not something magical that comes unbidden to the chosen few. The heart of third horizon work in fact lies in the praxis/vision nexus, with a particular kind of practice informed by vision, and practices that generate vision. This work, and perhaps this work especially, is what is required to ensure that H2+ has a fighting chance in the arena with H2-.

Vision as Praxis: H2plus innovations in spiritual practice.

Much of what follows is in early draft form, but it is informed, inspired and adapted from the work of Perpectiva’s Associate Director of Praxis Ivo Mensch who is a former Zen Monk. All this emerging work is informed by an understanding of ‘threeness’ (premise 3). In the age of AI, and since the H2minusvortex preys on our automaticity, there is also a desire to “make consciousness relevant”, as Ivo puts it.

Premise four (‘A new sensibility is arising’) is relevant here because that speaks to the growing appetite for third horizon work, illustrated, for instance, in The Emerging Futures Programme at the JRF and their work on Visionaries in particular, that we helped them with. Premise ten is also relevant because one of the ways the H2minus vortex operates is in funding structures. Layman Pascal’s reflections on how the liminal web is funded are important and potentially catalytic here. Somehow we have to shift from dependence on legacy money to creating products and services that draw money from horizon one towards horizon three. Those products and services cannot be caught in horizon one debt and investment for return cycles. Instead, the H2+ offer has to be prefigurative of different power structures and better social and ecological relations.

For now, though, I come back to the questions we started with. All these questions, I now realise, are about H2+ practices informed by Third Horizon sensibilities that recognise the power of the H2minus vortex.

• What do we mean by ‘we need to get out of our own way’?

  We need to engage in collective immunity to change practices that free us from our hidden assumptions and competing commitments, but we also need practices to get beyond spiritual and intellectual bypassing and/or clinging to the world as we know it.

• Why is the method ‘education but not as we know it’?

  We need to keep each other learning, and not just through ‘study’ - though there is that - but by recognising learning as an emergent property of interaction (grateful to Tim Logan for this formulation). The antidebate is an example.

• Why might civilisational renewal depend upon ‘a new metaphysics’?

  Metaphysics is a verb as much as a noun. It is something we do. We need to develop collective practices of inquiry that help us unlearn some of the deep coding of the cosmology, epistemology, ontology and axiology of modernity, particularly how it manifest in ideas relating to the individual, to progress, causation, reason and time. We need to learn, in Gebser’s terms, ‘to see through the world’.

• Why is what we need ‘not action but the power to create context’?

  As Ivo puts it, we need to learn ‘context artistry’, and innovations in spiritual practice are coextensive with practising in and for the context of a world in peril. One way to understand this is that it’s a sociologically informed spirituality, or in Wilberian terms, is spiritual practice that includes not only the bottom left (culture) but also the bottom right quadrant (‘system’) such that we begin to take responsibility for transforming the interiority of systems.

• Why does our praxis have to be ‘profoundly collective but deeply personal’?

  I speak to that idea in the following short clip on collective individuation, and we are working on the innovations in praxis that we hope will lead to distributed, emergent, or situational leadership. 

To summarise: An awareness of the H2minusvortex helps to clarify more precisely why political problems have spiritual dimensions and what it means to work at that level. This realisation informs Perspectiva course material my colleagues are working on now, which we’ll introduce here before long.

This is relatively advanced and difficult work, but as a team, we have come to the view that it is necessary. This work is not all we will be doing, and most of our activities will be more readily accessible, but if you want to change culture, and I think we may have to, this kind of inquiry is called for. Please let us know if you are interested in supporting us (the easiest way is to become a paid subscriber to this Substack) or joining us (email Perspectivateam@gmail.com).

Watch this space!

1. The Vortex in legal and economic innovation.

I want to give two main examples here to establish the significance of the H2minus vortex. The coinages are mostly for fun, but ‘CallousH2minusvortex’ is the wilful cooption of socially beneficial ideas for private interests and I illustrate that through the misuse of human rights law. ‘UnwittingH2minusvortex’ is about superficial approaches to deep problems, illustrated through the incoherence of green growth. (I envy the German language’s capacity to make compound words look normal).

Human rights are thought of as a major progressive achievement(H2+) of the twentieth century, and a form of social innovation (H2) that took us from the dark days of the Second World War to what would have then seemed impossible - widespread liberal democracy (H3). However, in the language of political scientist Zoltàn Bùzàs, who was part of my Open Societ Fellowship Cohort, human rights compliance is often “lawful but awful” (H2-).

Human rights are contested, difficult to enforce, often in tension with each other, and notoriously subverted for aims that are amoral or immoral, not least because the rights conferred to (intellectual) property owners are so extensive, and corporations and nations can be defended as if they were persons (consider that the “the right to self-defence” can be used as a defence to the charge of genocide). I run the risk of offending people and being misunderstood here, so let me also say that human rights work is often heroic, liberating and beautiful, and in my last post I shared how the creative use of the law made me cry. Nonetheless, the insistence on rights sometimes shows up as a planetary auto-immune disease in which the body politic malfunctions in attempting to serve the greater good and inadvertently promotes the interests of plutocrats and hegemons.

Consider these questions from my open letter to the human rights rights movement, and imagine them being asked by advisors to authoritarian leaders or lobbyists for global corporations. The machiavellian spirit here takes the form: how do we use the promise of Horizon Three to manipulate Horizon Two to maintain our power in Horizon One.

1.     How do we speak on behalf of humanity to punish those we disagree with?

2.     How do we institute global laws to spread a particular form of democracy that defers to the presumed wisdom of the market?

3.     Is there a way to create an institutional framework that looks like it helps clean up the social and ecological collateral damage of capitalism, without getting in its way?

4.     What kind of ideological vehicle could support the affluent West in claiming the legitimate use of force on the world stage?

5.     Could we create a valued mechanism premised on the importance of performative shame and outrage that was ineffective at addressing the root causes of problems?

6.     If we wanted to create an apparently axiomatic and shared set of moral touchstones that would never be fully accepted because they are historically and culturally specific, how would we do it?

7.     Is there a way to make it look like the most important political relationship is between the state and the citizen, while diverting attention from the extraction of natural capital, transnational financial actors asset-stripping the public realm and technology colonizing the lifeworld?

8.     Is there a way to alienate particular individuals in particular places by suggesting that an idealised abstract individual is, in principle, more important than them?

Those questions represent the harsh and wilful aspects of the H2minus vortex, which is one way it operates, as cooption, but it can also operate as a kind of default.

In economics, green growth narratives are vintage H2minus thinking. There are many powerful sources to support the claim that they do not stack up as a pathway to a viable future. A recent lecture by Nate Hagens on the behaviour of the ‘superorganism’ of humanity is well worth your time because it shows how apparent gains in one place are more than offset by losses elsewhere. I can also recommend a paper in Science rigorously questioning the sine qua non of Green Growth, namely that absolute decoupling of growth and emissions is possible over an extended period. I have also been informed by conversations with Mike Berners Lee, who introduced me to the expression ‘energy begets energy’ based on mathematical modelling by Andy Jarvis.

That debate will roll on. In the context of a modernist social imaginary, the case for economic growth is understandable as a political logic to meet economic needs. However, I have come to believe any growth prospectus in the developed world is ecologically illiterate, ultimately delusional, and unworthy of anyone aspiring to be a good ancestor.

It’s far from clear what follows for enacting this idea politically by democratic means. My former boss Adam Lent recently made the point that the post-growth movement are really a revolutionary movement who don’t realise they are revolutionaries, because nobody has articulated a viable political strategy to intentionally reduce the size of the economy in a way that commands democratic legitimacy.

The point is less about which side to take in the argument than to see clearly that there is an understandable madness to indefinite economic growth. This idea of ‘understandable madness’ has broader application, and it helps to make sense of why the metacrisis is “a multi-faceted delusion”. The following paragraph from Jackson’s most recent book, Post Growth (p150) gives a sense of our entanglement:

“A conundrum faces us here. Those who want change tend not to be in power. Those who hold power tend not to want change. The possibilities for any kind of change depend on the distribution of power coded into the rules of the state. The mercy of the state depends inherently on its mandate. The mandate forged by Western democracy is a very particular one. Political power is uncomfortably tied to the delivery of economic growth.” 

That statement captures the power of the H2minusvortex because it says that whatever your new idea is in H2, it will ultimately have to submit to the growth imperative of H1 unless you can somehow change ‘the distribution of power’ and create a new kind of mandate (H3).

I have come to think that beyond the elixir of wishful thinking, there is no viable and credible way to mitigate climate collapse that does not entail reducing aggregate energy demand and therefore effectively shrinking the economy as it is currently understood and seeking other forms of growth and abundance.

It took me a while to get to that view, but I believe mature economies need to have overarching policy objectives untethered to indefinite economic growth and the financial instruments that rely on it. There is no way the Davos crowd can hear that. It follows that our challenge is to articulate a pathway to alternative socio-political arrangements.