Paradigms Matter

What if social reality is not as it seems? Climate change offers an opportunity to take a closer look at how paradigms shape our approaches not only to systems change, but also to social change. If we take the future seriously, we need to take paradigms seriously too.

Unprecedented Extremes

Heat waves, wildfires, flash floods, and climate change. The news this summer has been relentless, just like the heat. But is it surprising? Not really. Ten years ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published a special report on extreme events (SREX), with the long title, Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation. The SREX Report emphasized that:

“A changing climate leads to changes in the frequency, intensity, spatial extent, duration, and timing of extreme weather and climate events, and can result in unprecedented extreme weather and climate events.”[1]

The same report concluded that it is “virtually certain” that we will see increases in the frequency and magnitude of warm daily temperature extremes in this century at the global scale. This reminds me of the Bachmann-Turner Overdrive song, “You ain’t seen nothing yet.” So, what do we do about this?

Imagining the Future

For inspiration, I took time this summer to read Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2020 sci-fi novel, The Ministry for the Future. This book has been lauded for offering a hopeful vision for the decades ahead, and this is something we all can use right now. It’s a serious and imaginative book, and what I liked about it was the way it honestly depicted the complexity and messiness of transformative change.

Most of the solutions described in the book emanate from current initiatives, but there are some different and disturbing ones as well, such as geoengineering in Antarctica and India and “pebble mob” missiles. Chapter 85 includes a long and incomplete list of the many projects recognized as contributing to an equitable and thriving world. Like Paul Hawken’s book, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History Is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beauty to the World, Robinson’s sci-fi novel makes it clear that change is already underway:

“We are already out there working hard, everywhere around this Earth. Healing the Earth is our sacred work, our duty to the seven generations… and then you must realize we are only about one percent of all the projects out there doing good things. And more still are waiting to be born.”

What The Ministry for the Future did not do for me, however, was to provide any sign of a change in thinking, i.e., a paradigm shift. Well, perhaps I’m not being fair. Towards the end of the novel one skeptical character describes an event in the future where people come together in a self-organized manner to feel a sense of connection:

“I mean, think about it, a worldwide movement during which all sentient beings aware of the project were to sing praise together to the one planet we stood on, to perform the noösphere created by this so-vast and complex biosphere, while standing on the lithosphere and contemplating the hydrosphere and circulating the atmosphere in and out of us, breath after breath — it’s great, but it’s a little hypothetical too, right?”

This hypothetical sense of connection is described as a new Earth religion, rather than an outcome of a social and scientific paradigm shift that recognizes wholeness, entanglement, and the deep insights held by many indigenous knowledge systems and wisdom traditions. What would the future look like if we deliberately engaged with a paradigm that recognized connection, relationships, and consciousness as the basis of reality?

An Appeal

This question is by no means radical. In fact, these days many sustainability presentations start with a quote attributed to Albert Einstein: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” The origins of this quote trace back to an appeal that Einstein made in 1946 by telegram to several hundred prominent Americans, calling for donations

“at once for nation-wide campaign to let the people know that a new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels.” [2]

Einstein’s appeal was made in the face of an immense crisis related to the atomic bomb. His telegram stated:

“Our world faces a crisis as yet unperceived by those possessing power to make great decisions for good or evil. The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.”

Add to this the unleashed power of vast stores of carbon and methane, and we see ourselves today not just drifting towards unparalleled catastrophe, but deliberately promoting it. Einstein goes on to write that

“We scientists who released this immense power have an overwhelming responsibility in this world life-and-death struggle to harness the atom for the benefit of mankind and not for humanity’s destruction.”

Today, the overwhelming responsibility for climate change is unequally distributed across societies, but the capacity and ability to respond is shared by all. That is, if we can metaphorically harness the power of our imagination to make a quantum leap to sustainability.

A Movement

Drawing on insights from quantum physics and quantum social science, we can move away from a paradigm that emphasizes and perpetuates separation, exclusion, extraction, oppression, and extinction. Using concepts such as entanglement, uncertainty, superposition, complementarity, and potentiality, we can work with new ideas, images, metaphors, memes, and practices to nourish a powerful sense of individual and collective agency that transforms everything, including our social reality.

Whereas the dominant Western paradigm perpetuates transformations based on a clear distinction between “us and other,” “humans and nature,” and “wholes and parts,” a paradigm for quantum social change supports a both/and perspective that acknowledges uncertainty and recognizes that [I/we] are [whole/parts] of one entangled system.

This does not require a new Earth religion, for in a quantum world, we are, and always have been interconnected and entangled — it is just our partial perspectives that tell us otherwise. We experience this entanglement through shared language, meaning, values, and context. As I describe in You Matter More Than You Think: Quantum Social Change for a Thriving World, paradigms have power, and we have the power to use them to consciously transform in an equitable and sustainable manner:

“Paradigms influence the way that problems are defined and addressed, including what is considered realistic, legitimate, and effective.”

A Revolution that Matters

In The Ministry for the Future, one of Robinson’s characters describes a banner over one of the rooms at an international climate meeting decades from now:

“Revolution comes; not the expected one, but another, always another.”

An unexpected revolution has to be driven by a new paradigm for social change. A paradigm for quantum social change. A paradigm that matters. To feed this non-linear and nonlocal movement, we need to revolutionize understandings of the relationships between individual change, collective change, and systems change. Fortunately, a #YouMatter revolution is already underway.[3]

Will you join?

[1] IPCC 2012, Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation (SREX), Summary for Policymakers, 5.

[2] See “Atomic Education Urged by Einstein,” New York Times 26 May 1946.

[3] For more information, see https://www.youmattermorethanyouthink.com/