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Whit Blauvelt's avatar

I was an ardent reader of Stewart Brand's Co-Evolution Quarterly back in the '70s. He championed long-termism (which I take it you're against), as well as cautions about the absurdity of exponential growth in production of energy and consumption (which we agree with) -- even an early warning the Gulf Stream Atlantic circulation might collapse. He promoted both "Small Is Beautiful" as well as, with The Well, one of the earliest online communities. And he was a great fan of Bateson's ecology of mind. What's now going by "degrowth" was the hippie dream back in the day, along with a great flowering of spiritual inquiries. Brand was subsequently discouraged, beautiful as all this dreaming was, that so little seemed accomplished to realize it.

What can we learn from that earlier wave, and its failure to successfully scale to a larger cultural and economic transformation? Part of the problem may have been painting with too broad a brush. We need, in the short term (and quickly!) growth in certain sectors. We can't just step back from technology -- as toxic as so many of the tech bros are. As a small example, degrowth arguments often focus on the cost of lithium extraction as a reason not to quickly go to electric vehicles. Fair enough, except there are now sodium-based batteries among the many alternatives to lithium. Salt is cheap and abundant. Putting capital into such material transformations requires a large dose of capitalism. Reducing the political power of evil capital (e.g. the fossil fuel industries and their investors) requires producing superior returns for good capital. We need a lot of growth in science and technology -- and that new technology rapidly deployed -- if we're to survive in our new, Anthropocene niche.

One more contrary observation: The primary political threat in many nations stems not from materialism, but from regressive spiritual claims, particularly those based in nationalisms, ethnic identities, and fundamentalist preachings. If the nationalists and fundamentalists in Europe, Asia and America were removed from their respective political arenas we'd all be far surer of steering away from the shoals of the metacrisis. Broadly, there are kinds of spiritualism which are worse than mid-century modern flavors of materialism.

Milton's Paradise Lost describes the tragedy of a previous generation of spirits being supplanted by a new one. How sad for the Gods of antiquity! Are we in a similar transition now, of needing new spirits, new religion, respecting the Abrahamic traditions for taking us this far, and now moving on to something better, something essentially more capable of a hopeful -- and fun! -- future?

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Bill Veltrop's avatar

Jonathan, your Pari Centre opportunity and your invitation to us are both wonderfully juicy.

I am especially intrigued with your design challenge: To advance ideas for how to give a room of about 30 people an embodied, enacted, and relational sense of our ideas about consciousness — to make these ideas more vivid and visceral.. I thank you for the invitation.

My half-baked thoughts on what I’d do with your opportunity:

Ask the participants to take several minutes in silence deliberating on this question — ‘Given the ‘community' (of place and/or purpose) most important to you, imagine how its culture (its shared patterns of beliefs and actions) would be different if its members where 10X more conscious of their individual/collective choices, and of the consequences of those choices.

Form into trios of participants who know each other least well, and share whatever initial thoughts have emerged for depicting that new culture. The trio task is simply to hear each other in a way that is generative.

Back in total group, harvest comments from individuals on what insights are emerging for them — about content and/or process. Do this popcorn style. No need to hear from everyone.

Go through the same individual reflection time, trio time, and total group harvesting — but this time focusing on the implications of what they are learning from this experiment.

Now, given this rich ‘warm data’ experience, you, Jonathan, can feed back what you’ve been learning from them, and using their language/insights, bridge into your ‘Flip, Formation, and Fun’ framing in a way that they can easily embrace.

Finally, open the floor to Q&A,

I appreciate that I’m projecting my experience/biases on you and your opportunity. Hope it’s a helpful projection. I’d be delighted to help co-evolve the design if this ‘warm data’ strategy happens to interest you.

Blessings, BillVeltrop@comcast.net

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