Why I Didn’t Apply for $100 Million Dollars

The MacArthur Foundation is offering large block grants to solve hard problems.

Earlier this summer I was invited to seriously ponder the question, Would you like to compete for $100,000,000 to solve a major problem in the world? It just happened to be the case that this was the amount I had slotted for one year of operations in a mature research foundation my colleagues and I were designing.

I chose not to apply.

Here I am on the deadline for submissions — the MacArthur Foundation’s 100&Change initiative comes to a close today. And I didn’t submit a proposal. This was a careful and deliberate decision. It arose as I was writing articles about the vision for launching a global network of culture design labs; how humanity is moving toward a future nobody wants and has the power to collectively choose a better path; and that all the pieces are ready to be put together for us to make the transition that avoids civilization collapse (article forthcoming in the Kosmos Journal).

This is the timeline for making it happen.

The reasoning behind this timeline is simple:

Humanity has now crossed four (of nine) “planetary boundaries” that define a safe operating range for global civilization. It will take 20–30 years to spread the solutions at scale. During this time, more damage will be done to the Earth’s life support systems. So we’ll need to be fully in regeneration mode from 2050 onward.

All of this is solidly backed by science. It is simply a true and accurate description of the planetary emergency our species must navigate in the coming decades.

So if this is such an urgent problem, why didn’t I apply for the $100 million grant? It has to do with a combination of factors — some of them organizational and others political. The organizational factors are easy to state.

• The application requires having an established organization with a five-year track record of being well managed. This means they are looking to fund people who have already gotten their projects off the ground. What I am seeking to create is newer, more groundbreaking, and less continuous with the approaches taken before.
• Building a core team takes time, longer than the application process for this funding round. I have been carefully “weaving” networks of people and organizations in which to birth the field of culture design for nearly a decade now. It is diffuse and emergent, decentralized and spread out. Getting the leadership aligned around shared values and vision will take more time than a few short months to get an application in.
• The problem we are solving is not programmatic — it’s about embedding a new belief in the life stories of millions of people. This is a more subtle point that I’ll go into below. Briefly here, we don’t need a new organization to manage the transition to planetary thriving. What we need is the cultural acumen to set clear intentions and achieve them systemically at the societal scale. This has more to do with lived narratives, belief systems, and social norms that align with this capability.

Said another way, it would have been impractical to create such an unusual organizational structure in the time period necessary to get an application submitted.

The political reasons for pulling out are more interesting. They have to do with the ways that pooled capital distorts market systems and how difficult it will be for the billionaire class to fund a revolution.

Here are some of the key political factors:

• In a capitalist society, those who have money get to make the rules. This is one of the fundamental reasons that all the solutions we collectively have are not being deployed. Money is invested by those with pooled capital (financial elites) to buy politicians, influence electoral outcomes, shape legislation, and so forth — all in the name of preserving their own political power. There is a profound disconnect between what is needed and what is getting funded these days.
• We will only be able to evolve our cultural systems toward planetary health by deeply critiquing the assumptions behind the models for civilization that brought us to this brink of collapse. We may discover that we have to move beyond capitalism to survive and thrive — as I’ve argued in dozens of other writings here on Medium throughout the year.
• It is typically the case that large investments come with strings attached. This is a corollary of the above points. When money is a tool of political power, it is commonplace for investors to shape practices for the projects they fund to ensure that status quo structures are kept in place. This is how “anti-solutions” are incentivized to keep progress from being made on many of the social problems we need to address.
• A revolution is needed — one that is spiritual, intellectual, economic, and political. This is not about creating the right institutions or launching initiatives. Those activities flow from something deeper: a fundamental reframing of what it means to be human in times like these. We will build the organizational “solutions” from a cultural evolutionary process that realigns mythology, narrative, norms, and beliefs at a deeper level than that of institutions.

In other words, what is needed is a profound disruption of cultural programming. We will only make it through to the other side by reconfiguring how we use technology, what it means to run a business, how democracies function, and what the purpose of all these things are in the first place.

This will require doing things like dismantling the global tax haven system to free up the funds for the transition; breaking the political power structures that keep us from having meaningful choices in elections; and re-aligning the social movements that are seeding revolution in different parts of the world so that they are resonant with each other.

As I sat with the incongruences between what is needed and how I’d go about requesting funds to create it, I couldn’t help but feel that the authenticity required to make real change must start outside the status quo institutions of power. We — the majority of humans on Earth — need to set the agenda. It should not come from a large philanthropic institution (even one that is earnestly trying to create good in the world).

So I chose not to apply. I realized that the work is just too damn important to have its power shared by the benefactors of a bygone era.

Large foundations only exist because wealth hoarders of the past made use of biased “rules-of-play” that enabled them to extract wealth from the many various commons of the Earth. They built up their power bases through a process of enclosure, privatization, and the aggregation of influence in both monetary and political realms. And they did this across a span of time measured in centuries — as colonial empires early on and in the form of corporate conglomerates more recently.

It is this very process of extraction, hoarding, and aggregation that makes the current capitalist system behave like cancer. It is the parasitic logic of wealth hoarding that has kept us from solving our most pressing problems. This runs deeper than programs and projects. It goes to the very heart of the problems — the spiritual (or for those more secular, “deep consciousness”) issues that must be addressed before we can proceed.

And so I continue to do my part weaving the social movements of the world, building communities of scientific practice that integrate knowledge across disciplines, and telling the story of our potential to make the transition with the amazing progress on hundreds of intellectual fronts that are capable of transforming social practices in every sector of society.

Perhaps we will apply for funding in a future round, when our organizations are more established and ready to scale rapidly. For now it is more important that we hold onto the integrity of vision and practice that will be needed for the field of culture design to thrive. It would be too risky for us to let money influence our politics at this early stage. What we are doing is more important and it’s going to require more radical levels of accountability as it matures in the next few years.

With that said, I welcome conversation about how to seed the revolution. What do you feel is going to help us coordinate ourselves to fund the revolutions needed in the next 10–20 years? How can foundations play a productive role in the great transition? What other organizational and political factors are in play?

I’ll be thinking deeply into these matters myself for many years to come.

Onward, fellow humans.

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