After the System Breaks

What Do We Do Now?

Destroying what you don’t want is not the same as building what you do want.
– after Don E. Beck

In my previous post, which you can read here, I described why breakdown is required, basically because there is too much in the current system (meaning politics, economics, industry, science and framings of reality that we are trained in) that holds everything that we think and do in its current configuration. It is locked up, not so much a system as a system of systems, or perhaps a metasystem. Hence, a metacrisis.

We easily think in terms of powerful individuals or corporations and look to blame them for their greed, corruption, sociopathy and abuse of power. That is easy to do, because those behaviours are very obvious, and also because we are a people-focused culture, especially progressives. I am not making excuses for any of them, either. While I don’t believe in a heaven or hell, if there is an equivalent of St. Peter to hold their souls to account (which I do believe there is), then I trust they will be assessed appropriately for their lessons to be learned. As will we all.

Any of us may at some point in our lives be greedy, acquisitive, controlling or misusers of power in big or small ways. Borrowing another biblical image: we are not in a position to cast stones. For every individual who stands out to be blamed, there is another who would have filled their shoes, given the opportunity. The systems listed above shape our world and our view of reality to such a degree that almost no-one is free of their effects. We give a lot of honour to the exceptions.

The implication of the above is that we cannot expect solutions to come from the system as it is, or from the people who run it. This is more than echoing Einstein’s famous quote about solutions not coming from the level of thinking that created the problems. It is more than invoking “outside the box” solutions. When the system breaks, the box will be no more. It will be an ex-box. It needs to be that, because that is how generative, open space arises for instituting something different. It is more than a level of thinking, because it is firstly a different way of thinking and then something beyond thinking. We cannot make this shift by minds alone.

Nor can we trust that a few experts or brilliant individuals can create whatever is required to replace it. Not to say that we won’t need brilliance, but it will have to be the brilliance of the many, widely distributed and buttressed by pools of crowd wisdom. So, I am suggesting that to think of “a replacement” would also get us into trouble; it would lead us to repeat the monolithic and rigid ways of working which are now keeping us stuck and unresponsive in our evolutionary cul-de-sac. It cannot be designed from the top.

Just how willing and ready are you to let go of everything that you have thought the future looks like, everything that has partly worked in the past and everything that has seemed to be “how we do this”? We are required to create a new reality and so we must do that from a new way of being.

Functioning From a New Way of Being

In case that sounds daunting or impossible, let me say now that I don’t believe that it is. Everything that we would need already exists. All the human capacities required are present, latent within us or able to be learned; we just need to use them. To quote William Gibson, “The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.” The challenge, as presented above, is to let go of what has been in order to make space for something different. In a more benign way, we, too, must break, and if that statement brings apprehension, I invite you to anticipate liberation and joy. After all, what we have is not conspicuously making people happy, so why struggle to hang on to it? It’s merely fear of the unknown. What if it could be easier than we have imagined?

The new way of being is only new for us. It is not new for planet Earth; in fact, it is exactly what created life as we know it. As Frank Herbert wrote in Dune,¹ “Life – all life – is in the service of life. Necessary nutrients are made available to life by life in greater and greater richness as the diversity of life increases. The entire landscape comes alive, filled with relationships and relationships within relationships.” Please see this sentence beyond its literal content and extend the notion of relationships and nutrients across the entire field of human interaction, not only with each other and human systems, but with all that is non-human and which we have tended to label as “nature” – as if we are not part of that.

How Did Nature Do It?

In one way the answer is simple. It sits within evolution as something that took place step by step, cell by cell and organism by organism. Perhaps we have been misled, bought too much into the book of Genesis and the mythology of a creator God who somehow just put it all together. Even though you probably don’t believe that, it’s an image that is reflected in the way we have worked, taking control and managing the world. We have learned the hard way that we are not God, not even little gods.

How nature does it is the inverse of that. It is a process that comes from within the living world, through its interactions, through a billion small acts of creativity. The system is in conversation with itself. Maturana and Varela called this “autopoiesis”, a system capable of producing, developing and maintaining itself by creating its own parts.

I like to use an image of a forest for this. A forest does not come about by the largest tree or even several trees determining how it should operate. In recent years we have seen some great understandings emerge of what is happening beneath the soil with mycorrhizal connections.² ³ But even before that knowledge, it was evident that a forest is not a bunch of trees, but a system inhabited by insects, ferns, grasses, birds, larger fungi and animals. There is a web of interconnected life in which all of these play a part in creating the conditions for the others. And across the planet forests differ in the mix of species at all of those levels – broadleaved woods, pine forests and rainforests. Each of those is a living entity, a metasystem that has developed over millennia as the species within it created conditions that other species could thrive in.

This is how we humans need to operate in the future, how we must bring into being the new ways of thriving in balance with the rest of life, as a part of nature. That does not mean that we may not introduce new elements into the mix but it does mean that we do so with awareness and caution, discovering how ecosystems respond and allowing time for their adaptation or recognising the signals that it is unable to do so.

More to the point here is that we take the same approach to developing new human systems. There may be as many economic systems as there are forests; political processes and societal organisations as different as ants and wolf packs. We have learned that arguing for right ways – capitalism, communism, Christianity, Islamism etc. – whatever their virtues, gets us into a lot of trouble, besides being usurped by leaders making power grabs.

Evolution doesn’t happen without the death of species or even the loss of ecosystems. Conditions change and are adapted to. A new species that is better fitted to thrive will emerge either existing alongside or eventually replacing one that is not; that is the story of Darwin’s finches on Galapagos. However, they did not do that by fighting over who had the best-adapted beak but by allowing nature to take its course.

How Do We Emulate Nature?

We humans will have to get our heads and our opinions out of the way, and we have to step away from thinking that we know better and telling other people how they should live. Their conditions are not the same as ours and we don’t know what it is like to live in them. They do. Maybe they will thrive, maybe not, but that is up to them. If they need to change let them see that for themselves. People are willing to change – they just don’t like being changed.⁴

Getting heads and opinions out of the way also involves getting bodies and feelings into the picture. And by feelings I don’t mean raw emotions, but our ability to perceive through pattern sensing, through gut feeling, through inner knowing and intuition and through our ability to connect more of what we know, but don’t know that we know. This means allowing the awareness of groups rather than leaders to be present in our choices. This is our safeguard against hubris and over-dominant leaders and our buttress against self-interest, whether intentional or unconscious.

It would be nice to tell you just how this is done, but that would be counter to the principles I am expressing here. What we are dealing with here are living systems that are in a process of self-organisation. We are not accustomed to thinking of human societal entities as living systems, but it is a potent step for us to do so. While the focus of this article is towards the entire architecture of our global existence, that should not mislead us.

Your body contains upwards of 40 trillion cells. You may find it hard to get your head around that number, but it is several thousand times the number of humans, so be grateful that it self-organises and you don’t have to direct it. While the details are fascinating, all that you need to recognise is that it took a while for it to become what it is, a process by which individual cells came together in increasing numbers, differentiated into types of tissue such as muscles and skin and became organs like your liver and your brain. You know how complex brain function can be and perhaps you know that your liver performs around 150 different functions. The many components are coordinated by nervous systems and chemical messengers, nourished and cleansed by circulation.

That is only a static picture. Your body grew itself from the first single cell through your childhood and youth. It maintains itself for decades and has replaced millions of cells while you read this sentence. It changes minute by minute in response to the requirements of activity. All of that precedes and enables our psychology, our complex behaviours and our relationship with the universe. Every cell, each organ and system, plays its part and contributes to that whole. If you don’t see how important the liver is to your psychological state, think of the last time you had a hangover.

I say all this in the hope that it helps us all see that the task of rebuilding our global systems will need to have similar characteristics. There is a joke about the organs arguing which is boss. The brain and the heart make their case until the asshole goes on strike and the body dies from the toxicity. The thrust of that joke is that if you want to be a boss, you have to be an asshole, and while you may find its resonance with today’s leaderships appealing, there is a more important message. Life does not do well when everyone is arguing about who should be boss. The question itself is dysfunctional. We should not be looking to have or be leaders, at least in the historical, hierarchical sense of people who tell us what to do.

The way that self-organising systems work is from the bottom up. They are more collaborative, more organic in nature. It is quite possible to run organisations in this way and some have done so. They are still a minority, but as I said earlier, what we need already exists. This way of working is fully scalable, so it can apply from the smallest to the largest. What that calls for is flexibility and fluidity. Not all components need to be the same and they don’t need to connect to all of the others. They only need to connect to those with which they have a functional relationship. Your pet cat knows nothing of the African lion but it knows about its servant (you), the birds in your garden and the other cats in your neighbourhood.

What do you need to know and what do you need to connect to in order to build a new system? The answer, probably, is not much more than you already know. However, you need to build a web of connections that involves listening to others, accepting that they know things that you do not. It calls for us to step out of our desire to control in order to hear the collective wisdom and embrace the choices that we make together. It calls for collaboration. Control tends to arise when we fear that we will not get what we want or need. It diffuses when we know that we are looking out for one another.

It can seem quite vague and fluffy to invoke love as a way to run the world. Kindness, care and compassion have been made to seem like nice-to-haves, bolt-ons that we can think about when we have more money (or whatever). In fact, love is the most pragmatic possible thing that we can do. The best families know this and raise successful children by exactly these methods.

The new system we need will be built in this way and the building has already begun through people who collaborate and coordinate to do so. There are millions of such people. Once more I emphasise that what is needed already exists, but not enough and not evenly distributed. As I see it, those elements call for many more engaged people.

I have the image in my head now of the army recruitment poster, the pointing finger and the words “This Means You”. Of course you may already be there, but I have the notion that many who are not haven’t yet engaged with the reality I am describing. I say this because so much of the discourse I see is about the leaders, the power structures and the many people who attract blame. I suspect, too, that the very platforms we use for those discourses are making even more money by encouraging them. They feed a status of victimhood. There is rarely any message suggesting that we might have power to create change, still less any message that is oriented towards building systems based on love, collaboration, kindness or care. And never have I seen on those platforms the message that I am propagating here – that the future will arise when we each claim the power that we have individually and engage with creating new systems to succeed the old ones.

I have another image – that of ants linking together to create bridges over which other ants cross to reach their goal. We are more than ants in so many respects. We merely lack what they seem to have instinctively, an automatic ability to step into that space. Ants don’t have any notion of disempowerment, or not being good enough to do what is needed. They don’t ask to see the entire system. They just take the next step and then the one after. They do what they can, where they can, with what they’ve got. And that is all we need as well.

The title of this post is “after the system breaks”, but we don’t have to wait until then. If you haven’t started, now would not be premature, because the more preparations we make, the better. To add another phrase, “If not you, who, and if not now, when?” We all have something to contribute. We only need to choose.

This Substack is one of the ways that I try to make a difference. It took a day to write this post. If you like what I post and are in a position to support, please do.

1. If you only know Dune through its cinematic portrayals, I encourage you to read the book. Even though film director Denis Villeneuve did well in many ways with its complexity, the book has a deep ecological understanding. The relationships referred to by the quote are its true voice. I might not be thinking or writing as I do now if not for the way it informed my perceptions many decades ago. It’s a great story too.

2. Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate – Discoveries from A Secret World.

3. Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures.

4. After Peter Senge.