Will we share our water with our neighbours?
At the Small Giants Academy we spend a lot of time imagining the Next Economy into being. It’s the vision that energises our organisational purpose and in the last few months of integrating into the team, I’ve come to learn that this inevitably positions us as messengers between vastly different worlds. Not just the worlds of before, and those yet to be, but also different worlds of meaning-making, interest and value. Our work then, as it evolves and adapts to the invitations of the collective moment, has largely become that of nurturing relationships across all kinds of divides.
Our meeting across worldviews isn’t necessarily always challenging, but it can be. We don’t have to venture that far into the world to find disagreement, with some of the most disturbing experiences of difference being those with family members or with friends, particularly in the context of global turbulence (that almost sounds like a euphemism… more like the global insurgency of the really Weird and Wicked). During the pandemic I was working at a grocer on a small island in New Zealand and was genuinely shocked to watch community members who had been tightly interwoven for years, even decades, isolate and exclude each other so quickly and aggressively. It was a reminder for me that an anti-fragile collective future, one where people can identify their locality as a community to which they belong or at least can call on for support, is something we have to invest in. It is certainly not a given. These emergent inquiries, informed by our shared history and growing sense of uncertainty, must be asked sincerely. For when our most progressive and inclusive moral codes are confronted with mass-unravelling, will we share our water with our neighbours?
We often talk about the rising temperature of our atmosphere, that we’re on a steadfast trajectory toward a 2, 3, even 4 degree warmer world. We know that 3 degrees, for example, would have devastating implications for our social relationships. Have we considered the reverse? What if we measured the rising heat of the socio-sphere? With every degree of increasing social upheaval, is there a correlating rise in global warming, in biospheric destruction? How many more degrees can we tolerate before devastating runaway social rupture? Have we already crossed that threshold? Many parts of the world are on fire and the next decade will only highlight the true cost of our fragmentation.
Where we push certain exchanges and relationships under the surface because of a lack of intention, opportunity, skilful facilitation/mediation, real or imagined safety, or shared language, these tensions only fester and contort into the kinds of ugly reactive debates so common in our personal and collective lives. However, it’s also true that if our North Star for relationships across divides (of all kinds) is that we meet each other with non-reactive, open and relaxed understanding then I doubt we’ll ever really participate or be transformed by these interactions. My sense is that rather than trying to force understanding where chasms of difference push us apart, or prescribing peace and acceptance where conflict arises, our role as connectors between worlds and facilitators of brave conversations means that in the most basic sense we are tending to the cracks between us. Tending with our attention and resources, with our capacity and privilege, tending with our deepest care for a more life-affirming world and the sober acknowledgement that everyone needs to be included in this transition if it is to be genuinely meaningful. In the next paragraphs I hope to play with the complexity of this work, tease out some of its simplicity and explore its healthier iterations.
Discerning conflict
Somewhat ironically, there seems to be a growing consensus that social polarisation is the most immediate and binding threat to planetary flourishing. Many of us can feel that our scathing exclusivity, particularly around different worldviews, is not actually feeding the world we so long for, nor supporting the generative function of progressive, pluralistic values. There is even a growing sentiment that it might be our polarisation rather than our Co2 emissions, species extinction, food system collapse, nuclear vulnerability or our burgeoning infocalypse (to name but a few) that bring us to our civilisational brink.
We must also be clear here, and tread carefully: there is a difference between polarisation and conflict. Conflict is an inevitable reality of our embodied lives, not something to be solved or fixed. Our task is not to avoid it, to smother our differences in naive claims of underlying similarity, to suppress our anger or hate, nor even, and perhaps this is challenging for some, to diminish the value of some worldviews over others. Our work instead is to wield conflict into a kind of vitalising friction that ultimately serves our personal development, or freedom, strengthens our collective ecologies and encourages us to move into our more expansive, connected and dynamic iterations. More friction, more aliveness.
Sounds good, right? But am I still being too naive? What about the wars that are unfolding horrifically in the world? What of the conflicts over increasingly scarce resources that many have determined will be a central orienting feature of our lives and for generations to come? I encourage these questions. They bring our conceptual hypothesising about suffering back down to ground in the muddy waters of our entanglement and personal pain. These realisations can be easy to glaze over when living with affluence in lands of relative peace, when overstimulated by a diet of sugar, heavy metals and an increasingly homogenised media-system incentivised for outrage and techno-optimism, or when the biochemical pollutants we’ve created in the name of progress leach into our personal and planetary nervous systems. (Apologies, I blame Daniel Schmachtenberger for my annoying verbal density).
So, here is another refining point: there is also a difference between polarisation, conflict and war. They are of course interconnected realities, but there are certain relational and perspectival conflicts that can be directly addressed if held and moved through brave conversations. Whether this decreases our vulnerability to war, I don’t have the confidence to say. But I feel deeply that the more real and well facilitated conversations we have across our differences, the more anti-fragile our communities will be against the onslaught of the meta-crisis. (Note: We also don’t know to what extent our personal relationships impact the greater collective or ‘field’, but given the revelations occurring in quantum physics about the relational and dream-like nature of reality, I can only trust that every word and meeting matters more deeply than our rational and concrete language could ever grasp).
An uncomfortable paradox
This brings me to my central proposition: that in order to tend to the cracks between us, we must hold our more uncomfortable paradoxes. It is true that we must both acknowledge the right of all beings to have the view and values that they do, whilst also deciphering the truth, goodness and beauty of certain perspectives and values over others.
For those of us saturated by the virtues and logics of our postmodern institutions the latter might resound within us an allergy or, less dramatically, a scepticism. The first alarm will probably resound at the creeping concept of hierarchy here, particularly given the last few hundred years of colonial hegemony, left-brain dominance and the systematic and normative brutalisation of other, or more-than-human ways of being. This tension is healthy and should inform our deepest care and inquiry around oppression in all its forms, overt and subtle. It is, however, also true that this is often our blindspot: we welcome all kinds of diversity and plurality, until we encounter a perspective that isn’t as plural as our own. We’re always judging and discerning the value of worldviews and perspectives over others. Again, this isn’t wrong or in need of removal, but these dynamics manifest more constructively (i.e. vitalising friction) when brought into the light, when brought into relationship.
The reality is that we are all always pulled across these worlds, across certain worldviews and capacities. We all have parts of us that are centred and full of emotional and relational capacity, and those that are regressive and run us into the ground. And sometimes it is appropriate to (safely) express rage or reaction, to stay in your clarity around injustice without trying to include another perspective, to not hold this paradox or tension. I wonder, for example, will it always make sense for us to share our water with our neighbours? As an organisation, however, our role is to open up spaces so that when we are ready, and when it is appropriate, we can speak to the schisms between us, our deepest concerns and challenges and that which is most meaningful to us. There’s transformational juice there waiting to work on us and move us to view from perspectives we wouldn’t have otherwise tasted.
But wait! There is also another hang up here: the post-modern assertion that all truths are relative is itself a partial truth. What encloses this idea is a deeper, more universal truth that there is a-more-truer Truth. Perhaps the penultimate capitalised Truth can’t be spelled out or even known by our monkey brains as we roam in this dissociated state identified with our individualism and unaware of the greater dream being dreamt (a nod here to Bernardo Kastrup’s work). Nonetheless, in the embodied realm of collective relationship it can be said that some perspectives and worlds nourish a ‘life-enobling’ future (a Dark Matter Labs phrase), and some actively subvert or seek to destroy it. For example a misogynist will see women as inferior, but that doesn’t make their opinion True. It might be someone’s truth that climate change is not influenced by man-made industrial modernity and externality-denying capitalism, but that doesn’t make it True. It is relative in so far as it is true from that perspective, with those experiences and values available, and it also isn’t relative because in relationship to more truer truths, its partial nature makes it un-True.
Everyone values something
And now to the first hand of the paradox: everyone values something and we all have the right to value what we do (i.e. development rights). In fact, inquiring into another’s deepest value can be a constructive entry-way into a brave conversation. What is it that a climate-denialist values? Perhaps their answer will offer a clue, a brief and flickering insight or reveal a long and overgrown path that might just open out onto some forgotten shared territory. Maybe. Or maybe it will lead to an even more profound chasm, groundless and frightening. Regardless of the outcome, it’s important for us to realise the generous gift of sovereignty we can give ourselves and each other in our unique and creative meaning making processes. This has implications for how we show up to each other as the urgency to transform and change another becomes the poison we seek to alchemise. In an essay he wrote about Meeting Our Worldviews, Alexander Carabi writes:
“It’s common these days to hear calls for new worldviews. These calls are often accompanied by a condemnation of the current ways of thinking, doing, and being. My claim is that every worldview is attempting to take care of something. And if we don’t acknowledge and respect these aspects of our current worldviews, then they won’t fundamentally change.”
How would it be for us to relinquish our sneaking desperation to alter another and their beliefs? Since inquiring into this for myself, I’ve noticed that my desire to change another, to ‘generate transformative change’ is laced throughout my work and it’s confronting. There is a real desire to increase goodness, to support a world awake to what is most beautiful, most True, but the arrogance lies in believing this work is mine, that I have the answers or that I can truly grasp the mysterious nature of reality. I thought Layman Pascal wrote about this well when he said:
“There are many valid prophetic critiques of the human condition but these must be distinguished from the agitated, often mentally imbalanced, and self-important social critics who feel they must accost everyone with the Truth (!) in their compulsive urge to awaken all the sleepers and denounce the so-called sheeple, these untutored shamans have forgotten that their role is to serve the well-being of the community.” (p.199).
It is, of course, slippery because it also doesn’t resonate to diminish the meaning of the work many of us do, or the breadth of our capacity and love for our world and all its creatures. My only resting sense is echoed in Carabi’s words here: that “Changing a worldview requires a radically different approach. The primary objective cannot be to change the worldview at all.”
The metamorphic power of our attention
There is, however, something psycho-active about leaning into these challenging conversations. When we approach the spaces between us, those vast voids of unbridled disconnection, where self becomes other and then folds back in on itself, the distance from my perspective or value to yours can shift from what we thought it was originally. Without pushing this too hard, when we meet these challenging relationships in honour of the developmental rights of all people, our relationship with the world, perhaps even the cosmos, suffuses our attention. With some practice and support we might start to see our own projections onto the world, our own distorted fantasies, and this work of tending should not be underestimated. It is perhaps the very thing that will metamorphosise us. Much of Iain McGilchrist’s work on the left and right hemispheres has explored, with unbelievable scholarship and mastery, this dynamic. He writes:
“Attention is not just another ‘function’ alongside other cognitive functions. Its ontological status is of something prior to functions and even to things. This kind of attention to, the very nature of the world in which those ‘functions’ would be carried out, and in which those ‘things’ would exist. Attention changes what kind of a thing comes into being for us: in that way it changes the world.” (p. 28).
Our perceptions of the differences that mark me from you and you from me are always distorted and in flux. Perhaps our discomfort with the other, other-than-what-we-see, other-than-what-we-perceive, marks more our discomfort with the truth of mystery and the unknown. What I’m emphasising is something that Thomas Kuhn iterates, as retrieved and brought to my attention by Ivo Mensch: “though the world does not change with a change of paradigm, the scientist afterward works in a different world.” Moreover, in his book ‘The World You See is the Myth You Are In’, a title which keeps swirling in my own mind, Daniel Pinchbeck writes that
“when we change our underlying mythos, the world we see begins to ripple and transform around us. This only makes sense, as we are not separate from the world, and how we participate in it, transforms it.” (p. 119).
Our purpose, then, for conversing bravely should not be to change those we are engaging with. We can, however, trust that in every meeting across divides something is always changed, something else is always brought into being. This isn’t to rely on some rhetorical, pre-tragic hope for a collaborative future, but to include the seemingly-strange logics of relationship and emergence we’re tracing in practice of a more life-affirming planet.
Where do brave conversations fit into systems change?
Are we locked in our own framing? What are we overemphasising with systems thinking and change? What do I mean and why is this relevant here?
If we give social polarisation the attention it requires, taking it seriously as perhaps the central issue of our time, the node through which every other crisis further accelerates, then it will serve us to inquire into how our current interventions and thinking might be missing the mark.
Or, perhaps more to the point, I wonder if our theories of systems change are personal enough to really meet the fullness of our fragmentation. I raise this concern here as a systems-thinker myself and because I’ve noticed that while emphasising the systemic nature of our global crises marks an essential turn in our reductive thinking, our awareness of how such crises are manifest, felt and metabolised personally is lagging and missing from so many of our ‘big conversations’. My sense is that our approaches must be re-invigorated and more radically intimate than many of us are comfortable with. Jonathan Rowson, co-founder and director at Perspectiva, wrote of this brilliantly in his essay entitled ‘Tasting the Pickle’. He articulates,
“When we’re invited to see the world through a conceptual map, we might feel some intellectual orientation but we don’t always see ourselves on it. When we are invited into the uniqueness of another’s experience and vantage point, however, our own sense of personal possibility comes alive. The more deeply and uniquely a personal experience is conveyed, the more keenly the latent possibilities of our own uniqueness are felt. Why does that matter today? In the first two decades of the 21st century we typically spoke about global collective action problems with words like regeneration, transformation or systems change. While that kind of amorphously ambitious language does help to elevate discussions beyond narrow or naive concerns the aspirational feels amoral, and it is insufficiently personal to have universal validity and resonance.” (p. 21).
When I read this for the first time I felt a genuine surge of joy arise and I notice this for those around me too. The more personal we make the metacrisis, this mythopoetic and mysterious ‘pickle’ we find ourselves born into, entangled, an intrinsic part of, the more meaning we find resting in our lives. I think this has the flavour of vitalising friction.
The cracks between us are those within us
“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are” said Anais Nin. Tending to the cracks between us means tending to those within us. When we exclude others it’s important to ask what in ourselves are we severing, isolating, pushing under? And even though you didn’t ask for any psycho-education, here’s a piece that you’ve probably heard before but keep occluding (just like I do): we often project the unintegrated shadowy aspects of the self, of our own psyches, onto the world around us. So, if we want to get wise and dance the wave of vitalising friction, it might serve us to explore our conflicts as fissures shedding light onto our deepest internal structures. My feeling here is that Carl Jung’s quote: “What’s most personal is most universal,” might take on another layer of impact when explored in the context of polarisation and culture war.
My intuition tells me that many of us prefer to emphasise the systemic and structural approaches to our times because we’re afraid, averse, or apprehensive of really including and sitting with the personal. Our unconscious material, our trauma tissue, the ghosts in our psyche, the friction in our families, the dark corners of our minds, our scathing judgements of self and others, the heaviness felt in our hearts… how could that have anything to do with what we’re seeing in the world? Let’s just address poverty and our environmental issues through policy, and institutional change, then we’ll have a fully functional world system working in harmony. And I get it. Anyone who meditates, who’s doing ‘the work’, in therapy or has had any relationship of any kind with another human knows the lengths our mind will go to avoid the crystalline truth of our deepest pain. But remember: shadow is inevitable, war and other dystopias are not. Our wicked problems are wicked because they call all of us, all parts of us, into relationship with the really Real.
I certainly don’t mean to suggest we should negate the space that systems thinking affords us, it’s a brilliant lens and map. If anything, we need to reimagine the binary tension between systems change and personal change. Wouldn’t it be more helpful if we saw the systemic and the personal as different poles on a continuum? What if we danced between them in our responses and call to collective action and social polarisation? What I mean to emphasise here is that we won’t foster deeper, more anti-fragile relationships between us if we don’t address underlying structural and systemic inequality. However, we also can’t address structural inequality without tending to the relationships within our personal lives, whether with ourselves, with those in our communities or with peoples across the world. They are differentiated aspects of the same phenomena and our responses need to reflect that reality.
Concluding thoughts
What will it take for us to find stronger, more capacious forms of social trust? Is it social cohesion that we’re looking for or more courageous and empathetic forms of being together? Could our medicine be in the tension that confronts every cell in our system and in our social ecologies? Perhaps I’ve left you with more questions than comfortable, but I’m reluctant for us to rest on any answer.
These conversations are innately gritty and much of the work ahead is really about inquiring into our own projection of the world, our own values, limitations, mental cages, and this is no easy feat for our habitual brains. “Intelligence is always at risk of over-adapting to the patterns it is best at recognising.” writes Layman Pascal, “We cease to notice our own bias. We look for answers in the places that we are good at looking - not necessarily the places that are likely to have answers.” (p. 251).
After all these words, perhaps my invitation for you, for all of us, is that we step bravely beyond ourselves, even if it means a very secret toe dipped in the water of another’s mythos. We must all become alchemists turning polarisation into that vitalising friction that pulls us open and fills us with insight. This work is liquid and potent, and these times have a kind of metamorphic quality. We might even be surprised by what we find in the cracks between us.
I’ll leave you with the words of Daniel Siegel:
“We often want our lives to be less complicated, which is not the same as being less complex […] The reality is that complexity is actually quite simple in its elegance. Optimising complexity has the feeling and physical reality of harmony. It moves across time, space or potentialities, the flow of moments, with a phases flow that is literally what a choir singing in harmony feels like, as the individual members differentiate their voices in harmonic intervals, and then link them as they sing together.” (p. 171).
References
Carabi, A. (2022). Meeting our Worldviews. Perspectiva Press.
Dark Matter Labs & CIVIC SQUARE, (2024). 3ºC Neighbourhood in Neighbourhood Public Square.
McGilchrist, I. (2019). The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Yale University Press.
Pascal, L. (2024). Gurdjieff for a Time Between Worlds: Hyperpersonal Essays on the Grandfather of Metamodern Spirituality.
Pinchbeck, D. (2024). The World You See Is The Myth You Are In: Essays on Politics, Consciousness, Technology and the Occult.
Rowson, J. (2021). Tasting the Pickle: Ten flabours of meta-crisis and the appetite for a new civilisation. (p. 15-51). In Rowson, J. & Pascal, L. (eds.) (2021). Metamodernity: Dispatches from a Time Between Worlds: Crisis and emergence in metamodernity. Perspectiva Press.
Siegel, D. in Freinacht, H. (2019). Nordic Ideology: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book Two. Metamoderna.
