Slowing down to reflect and relate deeply with the non-human beings that are part of the living planet is an important aspect of life and healing, especially in a social context of prescribed hypernormative busyness.

Slowing down

Disengaging from hypernormative busyness helps us to slow down and clearly distinguish the foundations of flourishing life from anthropocentric hubris:

1. Understanding the living planet as a dynamic system of ecologies of care beyond human that evolves via a process of collaborative niche construction.
2. Understanding the life destroying and life denying mono-cult of anthropocentrism / technocentrism, illustrated by the cult of AI. 

On the basis of the evidence available to us today, we are well advised to fully acknowledge human limitations, including the limitations of human science and technologies conceived by humans. This entails adopting a scale-aware precautionary principle in all human endeavors.

Scale-aware precautionary principle

At small (human) scales, practicing a high level of autonomous communal self-governance, and applying a political conception of the precautionary principle: ‘Communal decision making in Open Space, supported by an advice process and mutual trust, should incorporate a margin of safety; activities should be limited below the level at which no adverse effect has been observed or predicted (margin of safety)’.

At large (super-human) scales, respecting the sanctity of the living planet, and applying a strict, science based conception of the precautionary principle: ‘Activities that present an uncertain potential for significant harm should be prohibited unless the proponent of the activity shows that it presents no appreciable risk of harm (prohibitory)’

Together, the two parts of the scale-aware precautionary principle imply that no community, regardless of scale, is entitled to conduct an activity that presents an uncertain potential for significant harm beyond small (human) scales.

The scale-aware overarching precautionary principle tells us that social governance should never be placed in the hands of any person or institution with super-human scale decision making abilities.

The principle based and scale-aware social justice approach to collaboration between groups that is at the core of framing evolutionary processes in terms of collaborative niche construction has been distilled from a range of sciences and transdisciplinary practices, including the intersectionality between the neurodiversity, disability, and indigenous rights movements.

Now people are listening because their own picture of their own future is threatened. So it’s a bit ironic to reach out to Native people now to save their butts.

Indigenous wisdom that is really needed: How have we survived a 95 to 98% population reduction in a really short period of time? They eliminated, through massacre, starvation, disease from starvation, ninety percent of the population of California Indians between 1848 and about 1875. So we’re talking about one generation. One generation. So how have California Indians managed to survive that degree of Destruction?

To really study the genocide, to study what happens here, is the process of coming to a point of humility.

As long as they are not willing to deal with the human cost, and the cost in all of life that they’ve created with that attitude, taking that same predatory attitude and saying, well now I want indigenous wisdom – it’s really offensive, and it’s not going to work. It will not work.

– Stan Rushworth, from Prayer for the Earth: An Indigenous Response to These Times

Techno-optimism

All empires eventually die, with a perfect track record to date, consistent with everything we know about living organisms. All super-human scale cultural organisms that tolerate dehumanisation and permanent social power gradients between people are based on origin myths that justify such social power differentials.

In the 21st century we live in a multi-polar world dominated by three empires: Westernised countries, China, and Russia. Depending on what metric is used, either the first or the second of these empires is the largest or the “most powerful”. The selection of preferred metric in itself is a reflection of cultural bias – there is no objectively “correct” way to measure the scale of an empire.

Discussions of the risks of living in a multi-polar world are a distraction from a much more important question: Why do we still live in powered-up empires in a world that considers itself technologically “advanced” or “developed”? Asking this question focuses our attention on the role of technologies – of all kinds, in perpetuating and amplifying social power gradients, and on the role of techno-optimists in cult-ivating and perpetuating a myth of technological progress.

In the Anglosphere and in China, the notion of technological “progress” is increasingly entangled with growing levels of investments in digital technologies, especially so-called artificially intelligent digital systems. Anyone who understands the deeper foundations of these technologies knows that they are abstract tools for performing arithmetic calculations. Today’s digital technologies can be understood as the digital descendants of pocket calculators, spreadsheets, and accounting systems. Like a hammer and any other tool, each category of digital tool has certain use cases – and ignoring the limits of these use cases, especially at scale, easily results in significant harm.

The last three decades of fossil fuelled energy and resource extraction, exponentially accelerating investments in the Internet, the abstract logic of interest bearing debt, and the invisible hand (mergers and acquisitions), have led to a digital mono-culture and to a dangerous extension of the delusion of infinite growth on a finite planet, which has dragged humans and most non-human beings deep into the sixth mass extinction of the living planet.

We can only help the living planet heal from anthropocentric cultural diseases, i.e. from the three political empires mentioned above, plus a slightly larger number of digital technological empires, if we probe the origin myths of these cultural diseases.

The assumptions that are used to legitimise the highly unequal distributions of social powers and resources often remain unspoken, and those that are acknowledged amount to dogmatic religious beliefs about the living planet and the cosmos, re-framed either as common-sense or as scientific “facts” about human natures and evolutionary processes for which the evidence is entangled in a circular argument with the “natural” allocation of social powers in one or more technological or political empires. This results in worldviews in which the rise and existence of powered-up empires is an irreversible inevitability.

The rise of powered-up empires as an irreversible inevitability is the manifestation of the infinite linear arrow of progress that powers all modern political and technological empires.

I am less familiar with the specific assumptions that frame the current arrow of progress in China and Russia, but evidence for the misguided myths about human natures and evolutionary processes that frame the arrow of progress in US technological empires is not hard to find.

Current techno-optimism in the US and the Anglosphere is a result of willful blindness, including a complete absence of a nuanced scale-ware precautionary principle, and the elevation of neoliberal ideology to the status of a state religion. The propensity for carelessness and the associated sense of cultural superiority was clearly demonstrated to the world during the era of nuclear bomb tests in the Pacific, and is currently visible in the delusional beliefs that underpin US technological empires.

Digging deeper, the roots of current Western techno-optimism can be linked to a cultural shift in the science of physics and engineering disciplines following WWII, in particular to the Copenhagen interpretation about the measurement problem and the meaning of quantum mechanics. Adam Becker has written an entire book about this cultural shift to correct common misconceptions about quantum mechanics. He sums up the overall cultural effect on the way physics and engineering is practiced in the US as:

“Shut up and calculate!”

This attitude to technology design has become accepted practice in the domain of software and data intensive systems. 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. In the digital technoverse, biological life is perceived as becoming irrelevant. The mastery of controlling complex fossil fuel powered machines led to a sense of technocultural superiority in the colonial era, and amplified the desire to control human beings.

The reliance on formal symbolic representations and automated computations, especially since the discovery of data as “the new oil” in wake of the invention of the Internet, has led to a thin veneer of scientific rigor (“data science”), and an obsession with inventing abstract metrics and contrived categories within the digital realm, reflecting the cultural beliefs of techno-optimistic designers working in service of neoliberal capitalists, rather than a deep appreciation for the ecological diversity of the living planet, and a basic understanding of human cultural organisms as being integral parts and active participants within ecologies of care beyond the human.

The casual attitude to the limits of understanding at the heart of physics not only paved the path for the modern cult of techo-optimism, it also resulted in a cultural bias in which the precautionary principle has become irrelevant, especially when critical analysis might expose foundational ideological assumptions as unjustifiable or entirely delusional.

Adam Becker, who is an astrophysicist and science writer, is currently writing a new book on precisely this topic. A few days ago he gave an invited talk on the topic at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, amongst other things pointing out the absurdity of infinite exponential human technological expansion into space – simply reminding the audience that within a few centuries the whole endeavor would come to a grinding halt due to the limits of available energy in the galaxy and universe.

Less than 24 hours after making this talk available online, the public link to the recording was deleted. This prompted me to take a closer look at the SFI website. Now I understand why this author / book / recording does not sit comfortably with the establishment at SFI. It was sad to see the level of anthropocentric hubris regurgitated by David Krakauer in the introductory video for this absurd research programme – take a look, you cannot make this up!

“Changing the world one planet at a time …To search through outer space we shall need to rise above our inner spaces, the gravest challenges of our time — from reducing disease and economic inequality, to managing finite resources and surviving war — and to take all necessary steps towards a larger, shared goal: an understanding of life’s place in the universe. Because confronting the challenges of space requires braving and solving the complexities of life…

“…  The Miller Omega Program is run according to a set of values considered by the donor, Bill Miller, in discussion with the SFI President, David Krakauer, to ensure the most effective execution of the program in relation to the SFI core mission and donor intent.” 

Less than 24 hours after making this talk available online, the public link to the recording was deleted. This prompt

On Bill Miller‘s background:

… During his tenure as sole manager of the Legg Mason Value Trust†, its performance exceeded the S&P 500 index for a record 15 consecutive years. He was named Fund Manager of the Year in 1998 by Morningstar‡, The Greatest Money Manager of the 1990s by Money Magazine, Fund Manager of the Decade by Morningstar.com, and was named by Barron’s to its All-Century Investment Team. He received the Sauren Golden Award in 2015 and 2017 for Best US Equity Manager, and Two Gold Medals in 2019, 2020, and 2021 for Excellent Fund Management.

Bill earned his economics degree from Washington and Lee University where he graduated with honors in 1972. Subsequent to graduation, he served as a military intelligence officer overseas and then pursued graduate studies in philosophy in the PhD program at The Johns Hopkins University, where he currently sits on the Board of Trustees. He received his CFA designation in 1986. Mr. Miller is Chairman Emeritus of the Board of Trustees of the Santa Fe Institute where he served as chairman from 2005 to 2009. The Santa Fe Institute is one of the world’s leading scientific research laboratories, conducting multidisciplinary research in complex systems theory. A long-time supporter of the Santa Fe Institute, Bill established the Miller Omega Fund in 2016.

This tells us everything we need to know about cultural bias at the Santa Fe Institute. Sadly, the Santa Fe Institute is one of many research institutes and universities that have become heavily dependent on donations from individuals and institutions that amplify the the misguided beliefs of techno-optimistic cults.

Naomi Klein sums up her thoughts on the cult of AI as follows:

Is all of this overly dramatic? A stuffy and reflexive resistance to exciting innovation? Why expect the worse? Altman reassures us: “Nobody wants to destroy the world.” Perhaps not. But as the ever-worsening climate and extinction crises show us every day, plenty of powerful people and institutions seem to be just fine knowing that they are helping to destroy the stability of the world’s life-support systems, so long as they can keep making record profits that they believe will protect them and their families from the worst effects. Altman, like many creatures of Silicon Valley, is himself a prepper: back in 2016, he boasted: “I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.”

I’m pretty sure those facts say a lot more about what Altman actually believes about the future he is helping unleash than whatever flowery hallucinations he is choosing to share in press interviews.

Behaviourism

Techno-optimism is a direct extension of the fiction of homo economicus, which can be traced back to the earliest days of fossil fuel powered industrialisation. The latter manifests itself in the beliefs associated with the language of behaviourism, which exists in multiple dialects, and which has come to permeate and pollute many disciplines in the social sciences.

In our work we’ve tried to test some of the basic predictions made by the Homo economics model using some simple tools from behavioral economics applied across a diverse swath of human societies. Not only do we find that the Homo economicus predictions fail in every society (24 societies, multiple communities per society), but instructively, we find that it fails in different ways in different societies. Nevertheless, after our paper “In search of Homo economicus” in 2001 in the American Economic Review, we continued to search for him. Eventually, we did find him. He turned out to be a chimpanzee. The canonical predictions of the Homo economicus model have proved remarkably successful in predicting chimpanzee behavior in simple experiments. So, all theoretical work was not wasted, it was just applied to the wrong species.

– Joseph Henrich, What Economists Haven’t Found: Humans

The focus on economic performance and the subordination of all other dimensions of life in industrialised societies normalise coercive psychological and physical interventions. This has profoundly traumatising effects.

Practices such as Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA) to force compliance with arbitrary, externally imposed demands are pseudoscientific practices of trying to change an individual’s behaviour to conform to the social expectations of a particular culture. Various jurisdictions around the world have passed laws against LGTBQIA+ conversion therapy. However, the same underlying techniques of coercion continue to be applied to young Autistic children and other vulnerable people.

By framing the trauma responses to routine use of coercive techniques in terms of addictions, we can begin to comprehend the magnitude of the wound that modernity has inflicted on the living planet.

The delusion of the self at the core of homo economicus is feeding the addiction to various forms of social power – this “normalises” carelessness and deceptive forms of communication, and it allows the latent capacity for establishing dominance hierarchies to override our innate human collaborative tendencies towards mutual aid.

The delusion of technological progress at the core of techno-optimism is feeding the addiction to various forms of convenience and consumption – this keeps us perpetually busy and it distracts us from our human natures.

In the human social sphere the abstraction of techno-optimistic homo economicus is causing untold harm in the form of [religious] economic wars, which are increasingly waged and executed by digital algorithms with minimal human intervention.

The neoliberal invisible hand has become a self-fulfilling religious prophecy. This prophecy and this actively life destroying religion is a death sentence for the human species, but only if we continue to worship this toxic religion, refuse to confront our trauma responses, and deny our deeply collaborative and relational human natures, as well as our cognitive and emotional limits, and our embodied spiritual dimension, which is completely absent in the digital realm.

The art of living well in the cultural compost heap

We are already well into the sixth mass extinction. The civilisation of modern empires is in an advanced stage of dying.

The full implications still need to sink in. This will only be possible by framing the associated social dynamics in terms of cults and addictions, i.e. understanding the history of all empires in terms of a history of cults, understanding social power hierarchies in terms of addictions, and extending compassion to the inmates. The header image for this article was inspired by the following illustration:

The shift in linguistic frame allows us to conceptualise and work with the cultural compost heap, which nurtures intersectional solidarity on the margins of the mono-cult, and which gives birth to an embodied planetary spirituality that understands the living planet as a sacred relational ecology of care, weaving together all living beings, shifting our attention towards:

1. Relearning how to catalyse relationships of mutual trust and understanding beyond the human – a domain in which we can learn a lot from the wisdom of indigenous societies.
2. Nurturing ecologies of care, sowing the seeds of love – the art of living well.
   

There is no shortage of small human scale initiatives that re-conceptualise human societies in comprehensible, compassionate, and life affirming ways – the opposite of “Shut up and calculate!”

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.

Join us!

References

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