The human capacity for language serves to improve understanding and trust, fostering collaboration instead of competition. This contradicts capitalist interpretations of evolution and supports the notion of human collaboration. Society’s hierarchical structure and wealth creation methods perpetuate exploitation, leading to societal sickness. To heal, we must rediscover faith in humanity and focus on building trustworthy, life-affirming relationships within human-scale ecologies of care.

Being human

Framing evolutionary processes in terms of collaborative niche construction instead of competition is grounded in what we know about the collaborative tendencies of human toddlers.

The notion of life as a competitive game only found its way into the science of biology by interpreting Darwin’s theory of evolution through the cultural lens of capitalism. The complementary perspective of life and evolution as a cooperative game as described by Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin in Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902) was largely ignored in so-called “developed” capitalist societies throughout most of the 20th century.

Through the lenses of evolutionary biology and cultural evolution, small groups of 20 to 100 people are the primary organisms within human society – in contrast to individuals, corporations, and nation states. The implications for our civilisation are profound.

Humanity is experiencing a phase transition that is catalysed by a combination of new communication technologies, toxic levels of social inequalities, and existential crises. It is time to put ubiquitous global digital connectivity to good use, to curate and share the lessons from marginalised perspectives, and to reflect critically on the human evolutionary journey and on the possibilities and limitations of human agency.

In the book The Beauty of Collaboration at Human Scale I argue that becoming conscious of human cognitive and emotional limits, and recognising that these limits are just as real, immutable, and relevant for our survival as the laws of physics may allow us to embark on a path of radical energy descent.

The journey of exponentially accelerating cultural evolution presented in this book covers several hundred thousand years, from the origins of humans right up to the latest significant developments in the early 21st century, as outlined in this article. I wrote this book to equip communities and individuals with conceptual tools to create good companies that are capable of pumping value from a dying ideological system into an emerging world.

Lulu (paperback)
AutCollab (ebook)

Being part of a healthy cultural organism

The human capacity for language would not have given us any adaptive ecological advantage if it did not primarily serve the purpose of improving our ability to understand, trust, and rely on each other, such that every human in a cultural organism to some extent contributes unique capabilities and lived experiences to the cultural organism.

Healthy cultural organisms do not consist of:

• Isolated individuals competing against each other
• Atomised nuclear families
• Incomprehensibly complex groups and institutions

In fact, the relational nature of the big cycle of life is obscured as long as long as we attempt to define cultural organisms as groups of people or even groups of living beings beyond the human. The very notion of groups of living beings makes no sense.

Humans and all other conscious beings make sense of the world in entirely relational terms. If we care to pay attention, we even relate to the food we eat and to many things that in the Western Educated Industrialised Rich Democratic (WEIRD) world are not considered to be alive. The extent to which we feel healthy, well, and alive is a direct reflection of the health and aliveness in all our relationships, and the extent to which we are able to minimise cognitive dissonance across all our relationships.

We do not arrive at values and preferences in isolation, but within our dynamically evolving social context. Values are best understood as a second order cultural process, the derivative that emerges from our attempts of minimising cognitive dissonance across all our relationships.

The “self” is a WEIRD cultural artefact that denotes the “sovereign” individual, an abstraction, which according to neocolonial / neoliberal dogma, we should value above all else. It is much healthier to understand the self in terms of our deeply held values, which are the product of our lived experience in the ecology of care that we are embedded in – which may or may not be in a healthy state.

In a healthy ecology of care our values are closely aligned with the values of those we engage with on a daily basis. In an unhealthy ecology of care, our values may be shaped by the cognitive dissonance and the harm we are exposed to. Some of our values may then be consciously chosen in opposition to harmful experiences we have had to endure. If our ecology of care remains unhealthy, our values may eventually compel us to develop healthier relationships in a different social environment.

Appreciating the timeless patterns of human limitations

Our society has been constructed such that certain forms of exploitation are deemed acceptable / legal / necessary and such that other forms of bullying are deemed as unacceptable and illegal. Upon closer examination the boundary is an arbitrary one.

Laws and social norms in industrialised societies are shaped by the metaphor of society as a factory and the metaphor of people as machines more than most people realise.

WEIRD education is focused on turning playful and curious children into self-conscious individuals in a competitive world. Most of WEIRD psychology is concerned about developing a healthy “self” that is prepared to engage in the WEIRD game of “earning a living”, in competition with other self-conscious individuals. Increasingly WEIRD medicine is about treating the long-term effects of the chronic stress experienced by self-conscious individuals who are no longer embedded in a healthy ecology of care.

In the digital technoverse, biological life is perceived as becoming irrelevant. The unhelpful industrialised metaphor of “human biological machines” confuses first-order effects (the innate human inclination towards mutual aid and collaborative niche construction) with second-order effects (culturally transmitted “normalisation” of social power gradients).

Specifically, all societies that construct money as interest bearing debt and endow money with a quasi-ubiquitous fungibility to enable economic activity rely on the following four economic drivers or ways of “making money”:

1. Creation and lending of money for a return on investment: We use interest-bearing debt issued out of thin air by banks to prime the economic pump, and to provide professional bankers with a reliable source of significant income.
2. Speculation with land and real estate, and allowing people to inherit money: This enables people to “make” more money through lending for a return on investment, similar to banks, only that the means of individuals are more limited.
3. Hierarchical structures of organisations that offer extreme monetary rewards at the top: This encourages people to systematically take credit for the work of others to get to the top.
4. Creation of pyramid schemes that allow people to “extract value” from the work of others: This endorses and encourages harmful behaviours which benefit the individual over the group.

The common theme across these economic drivers is the willingness to exploit other people for personal gain, including the audacity to take personal credit for the results of others or for the results achieved as part of a team. Such exploitative interdependencies between people are considered “normal”, and bizarrely, we consider anyone who is able to survive comfortably by extracting money from other people as “independent”.

The four ways of making money are justified by a myth of meritocracy and circular reasoning – that people with a lot of money have “earned” the money and are entitled to a “fair” return on investment to cover their “risk” when lending some of it to others.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=i_wus-lnQls%3Fversion%3D3%26rel%3D1%26showsearch%3D0%26showinfo%3D1%26iv_load_policy%3D1%26fs%3D1%26hl%3Den-US%26autohide%3D2%26wmode%3Dtransparent

Realistic paths to “success” involve career climbing in hierarchical organisations or the related option of the creating and running a more or less legal pyramid scheme.

People with an intact moral compass tend to learn the hard way that all their attempts of investment, running charities or entrepreneurship only strengthen the status quo and amplify the economic inequalities. It is easy to see that honest people, and especially Autistic people, are systematically disabled in modern society, economically as well as socially, as many social norms are adaptations to the dominant economic paradigm.

Autistic people continuously work at the edge of their performance limit, which is often much higher than what non-autistic people are capable of sustaining, whilst not making a fuss about it. This invites exploitation. The social model of disability explains two of the most disabling aspects of being Autistic. To a significant extent Autistic experience can be described in terms of the downstream effects of:

1. A much reduced capacity to maintain cognitive dissonance, including the inability to maintain hidden agendas over extended periods.
2. Hypersensitivities, including in the social realm.

We find ourselves in a hypernormative global civilisation, with an anthropocentric performance-oriented culture and deep hierarchical structures of social power. It is revealing that the English language uses one word – perform – to refer to two different actions:

1. To begin and carry through to completion; do. To take action in accordance with the requirements of; fulfill.
2. To enact (a feat or role) before an audience.

The more competitive social power games a society allows, the more the meanings of these concepts converge. Performance becomes an obsession to conform to externally evaluated criteria.

In a highly competitive social environment in which some people are celebrated in terms of their “net worth”, and in which more and more experiences are commodified, mediated by purchasing power, life is no longer experienced as an ecological process, it is transformed into a performance before an audience that is measured and rated according to social expectations that are increasingly codified in and evaluated by abstract algorithms.

The conception of “intelligence” baked into Western culture and orthodox economic ideology is anaemic.

“I do believe we have to start thinking imaginatively about systems that are fundamentally differently organized. Shifts do happen in history. We’ve been taught for the last 30 to 40 years that imagination has no place in politics or economics, but that, too, is bullshit. I think we need a rebellion of what I call the “caring class,” people who care about others and justice. We need to think about how to create a new social movement and change what we value in our work and lives. People have a sense of what makes a job worthwhile; otherwise, they wouldn’t realize that what they’re doing now is bullshit. So we need to give this more articulation, and we need to unite with other people who want the same things. That’s a political project we can all get behind.

– David Graeber

Denying the timeless patterns of human limitations

Adam Becker, who has written a good book on the way engineering is practiced today, sums up the overall culture as: “Shut up and calculate!” This attitude to technology design has become accepted practice in most domains of engineering, and especially in the domains of machine learning, finance, and financial engineering. This is a culture of normalised denial.

Gary Stevenson does an excellent job of explaining the systemic nature and the lived reality of wealth inequality and social power gradients:

1. What is wealth? – Gary Stevenson
2. What is wealth inequality? – Gary Stevenson

The normalisation of the harm caused by social power gradients and powered-up relationships is the terminal disease that plagues all empires. Since we live in the context of the convulsions of dying empires, it is important to understand the cultural dynamics that are unfolding.

Social power differentials have a strong addictive potential for those who the system enables to wield social power over others. Wielding power via asset ownership is especially addictive and dangerous, since the power wielded is often indirect. Often the asset owner is insulated from the consequences for those at the receiving end of power by several levels of indirection, making it easier for the asset owner to remain in denial.

In the discipline of economics denial and obscuring harm is institutionalised and legitimised by refering to harm as “insignificant externalities”.

Addressing wealth inequality is not enough to heal all the human and non-human suffering caused by the energy and resource intensive ways of life that have been enabled by the exploitation of fossil fuels.

Eliminating wealth inequality without a fundamental shift in our values and in the cultural practices that define our daily lives, without a radical reduction in consumption and a radical shift in the ways that we relate to the living world will not reverse ecological overshoot and the sixth mass extinction.

We are currently using nature 1.7 times faster than our planet’s ecosystems can regenerate.

Even slowing down busyness significantly will not be enough. An equal distribution of wealth in an energy hungry materialistic consumer society will still wreck the planet.

The modern addiction to convenience and consumption comes in many different flavours. More is always better. Quantity is what counts. Quantity can be commoditised. Quantity can be sold as progress. Quality is systematically discounted by the religion of the invisible hand. Enough is no longer part of the Western Educated Industrialised Rich Democratic (WEIRD) vocabulary. The most obvious candidates for commodification and addiction:

• Material consumption
• Work
• Substances and foods
• Sex
• Gambling
• Entertainment, including “news”

The not-so-invisible hand is explicitly involved in ensuring that all these aspects of modern life are packaged in formats that maximise addictive potential.

This civilisation is finished. Rather than playing around with yet another “better” configuration of powered-up institutions, perhaps we are better served by practicing de-powered dialogue, and by learning how to de-power all our relationships – without asking any so-called authority for permission. The revolution will not be nudged!

Living in a sick, addicted culture

In our hypernormative society neurodivergence takes on a political dimension. Framing neurodivergence as pathological allows ideas from neurodivergent people to be dismissed as insignificant – simply because they are ideologically inconvenient.

In an interview a few years ago George Lakoff mentions his experience with John Nash, pointing out that John Nash had been working on co-operative game theory, and that this was a major reason for him being sidelined and locked up in a psychiatric institution.

I have been co-creating and working with formal and informal models of human collaboration in a broad range of domains for over thirty years. All along, the market based competitive models used by economists never made any sense to me, as they assume a level of cruelty and lack of compassion beyond what I could imagine. Developing and applying competitive models of human “collaboration”, i.e. “shutting up and calculating” would literally hurt my brain.

For a long time I did not realise the extent to which homo economicus acts as a very effective filter that guarantees that only adequately indoctrinated and compliant disciples of the god of the invisible hand gravitate to positions of power. Homo economicus has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, it is a collective hypernormative cultural choice, not a law of nature. The modern play book of anthropocentric civilisation building rests on the following frames:

1. All of life is a competition, which is framed as evolution.
2. Humans are declared to be superior to all other life forms, therefore we are declared to be more competitive, i.e. more evolved, which is framed as intelligence.
3. For human groups larger than a household to collaborate, it is essential to control human behaviours by constructing hierarchically structured abstract human institutions with coercive powers, which are framed as authorities.
4. Anthropocentric hierarchical structures of coercive powers and addictions to exercising such powers are justified by framing them as meritocracies – entitling small elites to make decisions that affect many thousands, millions, or billions of people and other living beings.
5. Effective coercive control over humans and all other living beings is deemed to be desirable – it is framed as progress.
6. Within the anthropocentric frame of progress, the right to earn a living, i.e. the right to exist, is framed as the freedom to submit to the authority of powered-up institutions, and in return being able to meet our emotional and bodily needs by choosing options from menus pre-configured by the institutional landscape.
7. The option to choose specific members from the elite class to head some of the pyramids of institutionalised social power is framed as democracy.
8. The option to establish non-democratic powered-up institutions, and to profit from such pyramid schemes at the expense of others is framed as the god of the invisible hand of the market.
9. The busyness, stress, addictions, energy use, waste, and ecological harm generated by the freedom to submit to authorities and consume from pre-configured menus is framed as economic performance.
10. The refusal to submit to authorities and consume from pre-configured menus is framed as being uncivilised, underdeveloped, primitive, or illegal.

What could possibly go wrong?

The first element in the stack of ten anthropocentric frames above is the product of the cultural bias of the religion of economics.

The innate collaborative tendencies of human toddlers that have not yet been fully socialised contradict the assumptions baked into homo economics. Replacing homo economicus with what we now understand about the human species radically transforms all the frames for understanding cultural evolution. A frame of collaborative niche construction allows human potential to contribute to rather than extract from the living planet.

A production/consumption paradigm for what an economy is is a guarantee for ultimately destroying the planet and each other. Even when you talk about degrowth, if you’re working within that paradigm, you’re essentially doomed. We need to break away from that paradigm entirely. Care and freedom on the other hand are things you can increase as much as you like without damaging anything. So we need to think: what are ways that we need to care for each other that will make each other more free? And who’re the people who are providing that care? And how can they be compensated themselves with greater freedom? To do that we need to like, actually scrap almost all of the discipline of economics as it currently exists.

We’re actually just starting to think about this. Economics as it currently exists is based on assumptions of human nature that we now know to be wrong. There have been actual empirical tests of the basic sort of fundamental assumptions of the maximizing individual that economic theory is based on, and it turns out that they’re not true. It tells you something about the role of economics that this has had almost no effect on economic teaching whatsoever. They don’t really care that it’s not true.

But one of the things that we have discovered, which is quite interesting, is that human beings have a psychological need to be cared for, but they have an even greater psychological need to care for others, or to care for something. If you don’t have that you basically fall apart. It’s why old people get dogs. We don’t just care for each other because we need to maintain each other’s lives and freedoms, but our own psychological happiness is based on being able to care for something or someone. 

– David Graeber, From Managerial Feudalism to the Revolt of the Caring Classes, 2019

Being alive

Humans have only survived in the face of much stronger top predators in various ecosystems by being able to collaborate, and by using symbolic language to better understand each other’s intentions and to coordinate our actions.

Yes, eventually we displaced the top predators in all ecosystems, and we became the most prolific primate on the planet. But this would have been completely impossible if symbolic language had evolved primarily to allow us to engage in fierce competition with each other, and to deceive each other.

To better communicate how all these topics fit together, I have embarked on another book curation and distillation project. The overarching theme could be described as ‘The psychology of human scale ecologies beyond the human’, but I also want to highlight the key element that holds together all the threads, which has been systematically eroded in Westernised societies: the notion of trust, including the role of trustworthy, sacred relationships within the context of human scale ecologies of care beyond the human, resulting in the working title ‘Trust in Human Scale : Ecologies of care beyond the human’.

The biological evolutionary heritage of our capacity for culture and symbolic thought and language is directly linked to – and dependent – on our ability to fully trust each other in life and death situations.

Generalising to an ecological context beyond the human, Janine Benyus summarises the evolutionary process of life as follows:

In the natural world the definition of success is the continuity of life. You keep yourself alive and you keep your offspring alive. That’s success, but it’s not the offspring in this generation. Success is keeping your offspring alive 10 000 generations and more, and that presents a conundrum, because you cannot, you’re not going to be there.

What life has learned: To take care of your offspring 10 000 generations from now. So what organisms have learned to do is to take care of the place that’s going to take care of their offspring. Life has learned to create conditions conducive to life, and that’s really the magic heart of it.

Life creates conditions conducive to life.

– Janine Benyus

The book will build on the foundations laid in the book on the beauty of collaboration at human scale that I collated in 2021, covering the scope outlined in the sections below.

Being part of the living planet

There is no shortage of small human scale initiatives that re-conceptualise human societies in comprehensible, compassionate, and life affirming ways.

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.

I’ve studied quantum theory. We realised that the particles in the world are really not the basic reality. The basic reality is potential and energy, and it’s only when you try and measure it, then it shows up as a particle, or it shows up as a wave, but the reality really is that which connects, the non-separability problem. My PhD thesis was on non-separation, non-locality, and quantum theory. We knew [this] 100 years ago in physics, and yet an obsolete physics of more than 100 years ago is being used to shape and and divide a very interconnected world. So dualism today is not just epistemologically so wrong, it is not just ontologically so wrong, it is spiritually just not the right way to think of the world, but it is now becoming a threat to human life, preventing people from living with each other in diversity with love. And that’s why we have to spread the message of non-dualism, of interconnectedness, of oneness through love, and we have to be the practice...

All cultures had economies but it wasn’t the first organising principle, it was a byproduct of good living… Where did that wealth come from? It was an economy, but it was not an economy of extraction. It was not an economy of domination, it was an economy of living. If you go to the roots of the word economy, economy according to Aristotle is the art of living. Our civilisation has very deep spiritual foundations, and through spirituality you know that the diversity in the world is really different expressions of the same oneness… Let all the beings flourish…

– Vandana Shiva

Collectively we can tap into a wealth of knowledge and timeless indigenous wisdom.

Having faith in the living planet

Lived experience in nurturing and maintaining mutual trust at human scale is the key ingredient for being at ease in a seemingly unpredictable world. Being able to rely on each other is at the core of the evolutionary heritage of our species.

Mutual trust is a biophilic ecological phenomenon of emergent local predictability that is not limited to humans. In a dynamic ecological context, enduring relationships of mutual trust constitute the ingredients of a life affirming ecology of care that is integrated into the regenerative cyclical flow of life.

Mutual trust is the priceless currency of living systems.

Healing

Healing starts with rediscovering our faith in humanity. The sacred cycle of life includes the joy of birth, the art of living well, and the process of dying in good company, and thereby giving back nutrients to the living planet.

The neurodiversity, disability, and indigenous rights movements are part of the cultural immune system of human societies, responding to the mechanistic, hypercompetitive, and rule based approach to social arrangements imposed by the learning disabled mono-cult with a holistic social justice approach.

We heal by following our heart. We reduce cognitive dissonance by being human – by sobering up, by rejecting the life denying mono-cult, by seeing the beauty in all living beings.

Along the way, instead of abusing the discipline of mathematics to shut people up, and to calculate ever more perverse ways of out-competing each other, we can rediscover and revive the much older framing of mathematics as the beautiful art of explanation, within a collaborative frame of omni-directional learning. Below is a good example, also highlighting the inherently collaborative nature of mathematical discovery.

Whether A♾tistic dreamers are able to establish alternative ecologies of care beyond the human is no longer up for debate. We have nothing to lose. We deeply appreciate the wonder of life, and we clearly see the global mono-cult for what it is. 

We are A♾tistic. We are fully human. We are alive.

Further reading on WEIRD cultural bias

1. Sowing the seeds for ecological and intersectional communal wellbeing
2. Autistic people are not for sale
3. The massive cognitive and emotional blind spot at the core of modernity
4. Understanding power and de-powering
5. Coherent theories of human ways of being
6. From pseudo-philosophical psychiatrists to openly Autistic culture
7. Collaborative niche construction
8. The continuously shifting justifications for pathologising non-conformists
9. Include all Conversion Therapies in Legislative Ban
10. The purpose of human cultures
11. Reclaiming the essence of humanity
12. Replacing control with ecologies of care
13. Autistic people – The cultural immune system of human societies
14. Active disablement of minorities